ARCADIA

POLITICAL
MAGAZINE

ISSUE I
MAY 2015

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

ISSUE I

ISSUE I

Arcadia Political Magazine

Staff

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

Table of Contents
4

LETTERS FROM THE EDITORS Matthew Wallock and Hannah Skopicki

WHOSE COUNTRY IS IT ANYWAY? Aidan Martinez

LIBERALISM AND MY DISCONTENTS Spencer Brown

SELECTIVE SERVICE AND WOMEN Victoria Hammitt

WHY I REFUSE TO CHOOSE Hannah Skopicki

Joseph Nucci

10

WOMEN IN AMERICAN GOVERNMENT Courtney Weigand

Managing Editor

11

CLASSISM AND WEALTH INEQUALITY Christina Sickinger

12

ABORTION, POLARIZATION, AND THE DISSEMINATION

OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL BINARY Joseph Nucci

14

DOLLARS IN DEMOCRACY Dan Kim

16

STUDENT RESPONSES: WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE MOST

PRESSING ISSUE IN POLITICS TODAY?

18

PRESIDENTIAL POWER Maile McCann

19

GENDER AND THE WAGE GAP Amelia Spittal

20

HOUSES DIVIDED Aidan Berkely

22

THE HERO THE REPUBLICANS NEED Mattison Asher

25

THE POLITICS OF MORALITY Zach Dravis

26

EDUCATION AND INCOME INEQUALITY Andy Samant

29

ON FOSSIL FUEL DIVESTMENT Melissa Lowe

30

IN DEFENSE OF THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF GAY MARRIAGE

Aaron Stagoff-Belfort

32

68 REVISITED Mark Odeltnov

Editors-in-Chief
Hannah Skopicki
Matthew Wallock
Executive Editors
Alison Mann

Jack Guenther
Layout and Design Editor
Molly Schiff
Outreach and Media Editor
Victoria Hammitt
Staff Writers
Maile McCann
Christina Sickinger
Amelia Spittal
Aaron Stagoff-Belfort
Copy Editors
Erica DeMichiel
Jack Guenther
Elena Rosenthal
Chairman, Wesleyan Republican Committee
Emmakristina Sveen
President, Wesleyan Democrats
Nat Warner

Mission
Statement
Arcadia Political Magazine was founded in
2015 by the Wesleyan Democrats and the
Wesleyan Republican Committee to serve as
a platform for political engagement. Entirely
student-run and multipartisan, Arcadia aims
to increase and elevate political discourse on
campus by illustrating the range of political
views and experiences of Wesleyan students.

Editorial
Disclaimer
The views and opinions published in Arcadia
Political Magazine are not necessarily those
of Arcadia Political Magazine or any of its
affiliated organizations, including Wesleyan
University, the Wesleyan Democrats, the
Wesleyan Republican Committee, advertisers,
staff, and so forth. Each submission represents
only the perspective of its author.

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

ISSUE I

Letters from the Editors

Hello and welcome to Arcadia Political Magazines first issue!
Earlier this year I was tasked with profiling the Wesleyan Republican Committee for The Argus. One of
the groups founders, Emmakristina Sveen 17, told me of her plans to work with the Wesleyan Democrats
on a range of bipartisan endeavors, including a publicationmaybe a magazine, maybe a website, maybe
a blogedited by members of both groups. I was immediately sold.
Over winter break I corresponded with Hannah Skopicki 18 and Joseph Nucci 16 to compile a make-shift
team of editors, all committed to increasing political engagement on campus by publishing student-driven
political material. Our next step was to come up with a title.

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

ISSUE I

Whose Country Is It Anyway?

The Border, DREAMers, and the Idealized American

AIDAN MARTINEZ
CONTRIBUTOR
Remember when you were taught that
America is a melting pot in elementary
school? Our country was built by immigrants,
for immigrants. Everyone who came to America knew that they had a fighting chance to
succeed. The political rhetoric of today, however, has shifted away from that original narrative. Immigrants are not seen as valuable

In Greek mythology, Arcadia refers to an unattainable utopia. So why would we call this magazine Arcadia? Perhaps because it is our attempt to reach such a place; to strive for an ideal of meaningful political
discourse, thoughtful political reflection and analysis, and, above all, substantive collaboration with those
whose views and beliefs diverge from our own.
What is Arcadia Political Magazine? Its a dynamic platform for all-things-politics at Wesleyan. Beginning
in the fall, we will operate a weekly calendar to which anybody may submit any political event. We will run
a blog to which anybody may submit any political post. We will print our magazine as soon as we receive
sufficient funds, and we will distribute our print issues around campus. Lastly, we will work our hardest to
solicit more diverse contributions from students of different backgrounds, affiliations, and profiles. It may
sound utopian, but were up for the challenge.
Matt Wallock
Editor-in-Chief

***

In the winter of 2014, a group of ten people sat in a small room in the basement of Allbritton. That meeting, spearheaded by Emmakristina Sveen 17 and Marshal Lawler 16, blossomed into Arcadia Political
Magazine.
I am a firm believer in growth. In its first semester Arcadia has grown from an idea to a published magazine with numerous submissions and a wealth of campus support. In the future we will update a political
engagement calendar and a blog to increase discussion of politics at Wesleyan.
It has truly been a pleasure to work on Arcadia with Wesleyan students of different ideologies. The greatest
joy is how open-minded our organization of students from various walks of life proved to be.
I look forward to the limitless future of Arcadia at Wesleyan.
Hannah Skopicki
Editor-in-Chief

citizens who contribute to society but instead

as takers. The rebirth of xenophobia has
been championed by the Tea Party, which is
trying to limit what defines a real American.
In reality, what makes our country so great is
the fact that there is no defined American.
We must go beyond the narrative we are told
by politicians to get down to the truth: immigrants just want a chancethe same chance
that many U.S. citizens ancestors received.
All nine of my aunts and uncles were anchor babies. My grandparents would come
to the United States, have their child, and go
back to Mexico. They eventually settled in the
U.S. when my father was born, number ten,
and my grandparents would be able to become residents due to their childrens status.
Anchor babies were never discussed at the level of political discourse that they have reached
today. Democrats tried their hardest in 2010
to prevent young immigrants from becoming
political pawns with the Development, Relief,
and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM)
Act. Although my aunts, uncles, and father
are not DREAMers, they could have been
ripped away from my grandparents at any
time. The act would have given children, who
were not born in the U.S. but were brought
here illegally at a young age, an opportunity
to grow up in the only country they knew. The
c/o merchant.auctivacommerce.com

bill passed the house with a vote of 216-198

but failed to break cloture in the senate with
a split of 52-44. Immigrants, both young and
old, started to be labeled as takers.
Anyone from the border who understands
the local economy will tell you that immigrants or visitors from Mexico are not takers
but are in fact necessary. Im from El Paso,
Texas, a city that shares the largest international metropolitan area with Ciudad Juarez,
Mexico. Our economies were once intertwined due to the
ease of crossing the
border. The Drug
War had turned
Ciudad Juarez into
a hostile place, in
which even Mexican citizens feared
for their lives. They
fled their country
and came to America, bringing their
businesses
with
them and saving El
Paso from the worst of the Great Recession.
No one talks about that. What people do talk
about is how on March 11, 2010, the mayor
of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, received the head of a pig as a threat. Politicians
like Rick Perry
made
comments
such
as,
bullets [are]
hitting the
city hall in El
Paso, and,
bombs [are]
exploding in
El Paso. It
painted the
border
as
a terrifying
place and it
fueled the nations reckless behavior of building a useless
fence. It labeled immigrants as evil and scared
Americans.
I applaud President Barack Obama for
his executive immigration action. He took
the reigns of a narrative spiraling out of control and attempted to redefine what the word
immigrant actually means. Immigration
is truly about letting families who want a

fighting chance into our country and barring

criminals from entering. The only difference
between a child born within our borders and
one born outside is the amount of opportunity the former has. How can we have a statue
that tells us to give us their poor when we
reject them without a second thought? The
path to citizenship that immigrants need
does not exist because the politicians who are
in power have no incentive to create it. By
2020, Latinos are projected to rise to 40.5%
of the Texas population, closing the gap with
whites who will stand at 41.1%. This population shift would be disastrous for Republicans
since Latinos tend to vote Democrat. A new,
diverse Texas could result in a purple electoral
state instead of a deep red one. When Democrats own California, Texas, and New York,
its game over.
The talking points on immigration are not
about waiting in line to become an American
but rather who deserves to be an American.
We have no right to say who deserves to be an
American and who does not. Whoever is willing to put in the work and contribute to our
country deserves the right to be an American
citizen. It is up to us, as citizens, to ignore the
toxic dialogue used to demonize immigrants
and to realize that we are a country founded
by immigrants for immigrants. Sure, not as

many immigrants are fleeing religious persecution as was once the case, but they are still
fleeing for their lives. Above all, they are fleeing for their childrens lives. Immigration is
only politicized because the balance of power
is on the line. We must look beyond what Republicans and Democrats say about immigration and look at the facts: human lives are on
the line.
c/o zazzle.com

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

ISSUE I

Liberalism and My Discontents

A Wesleyan Socialist Speaks Out
SPENCER BROWN
CONTRIBUTOR

Wesleyan liberals,
As a founding member of the Wesleyan Democratic Socialists, I have a confession to make: I used to be a liberal too.
Archliberal was more like it. Volunteering for Obama and Elizabeth Warrens
campaigns in my free time, interning for
Congressman Joe Kennedy, member of
my high schools Student Democrats club,
I was the epitome of a young, idealistic,
Democratic Party activist.
And then I wasnt.
Its not like there was a single defining
moment when I said to myself, I am a
socialist. My political journey was a long
process that involved a lot of soul-searching, a story that would both needlessly take
up too much space and too much of your
time, and I intend to do neither.
My reason for writing this essay is first
and foremost to engage with students on
this campus who identify as liberals, to
create a real dialogue between liberal and
socialist camps. There will be none of the
masturbatory and cynical better than
thou tirades that, unfortunately, all too
many radicals take part in. Im not here to
unconstructively attack liberal values from
afar, but to provide a measured critique of
the inadequacy of liberalisms vision and
tactics.
A better world is possible, a sentiment
that Im sure many liberals on this campus share. That shared desire to see a
better world is why socialists and liberals
need to engage with each other in the first
place. However, any movement capable
of achieving that world will need to move
beyond liberalisms limits and embrace the
radicalism of the socialist project.

The Past
If theres one thing that separates the
liberal worldview from the socialist one,
its liberalisms lack of a strong sense of
history. That difference can be summed
up with a passage from the young Marx,

in which he bitingly wrote, political economy starts from the point of private property; it does not explain it. Just like the
economist who takes the social relations of
capitalism as a self-evident and eternal axiom beyond history, liberal ideals of a reformed and humane capitalism begin with
the social-democratic compromise and its
resulting welfare state without explaining
their historical origins. What is accepted as a given by liberals should instead
be explained in terms of actual historical
processes, namely the political movements
and organizations that led to such achievements.
It is here that even a shallow reading of
history leads to one of the central theses of
this essay: That the relative success of capitalism at providing a mass basic standard
of living came from the relative success of
movements that actively battled against it.
In other words, concessions like the
8-hour workday, the end of child labor, a
living wage, and workplace safety didnt
come out of the goodness of the hearts
of capitalists and politicians. Those concessions had to be militantly fought for by
workers themselves, often in the face of
great violence and repression by both business and the state. The Ludlow Massacre
of 1914, in which the Colorado National Guard stormed a tent encampment of
striking miners, killing 20 people, including 11 women and two children, is just
one example of Americas long history of
bloody and violent industrial conflict.
Unfortunately, liberals all too often fail
to see the conflict that has been and still
is at the heart of capitalism. Instead, liberals tend to look at the past in terms of
heroic individuals (FDR, LBJ) and specific legislation (Social Security, Civil Rights
Act). Thus, from the liberal point of view,
change came not from people organizing
in the streets and in the workplace, but
from backroom deals between politicians
and policy written by government bureaucrats.
In contrast to that narrow view of history, socialists look to the actual movements
themselves for inspiration, specifically the
ways in which common people became
capable of forcing concessions from polit-

ical and economic elites through collective

action. Thus, from a socialist perspective,
the history of the Great Depression was
less about policies coming from the office
of FDR and more about events like the
1934 West Coast Waterfront strike, where
32,000 dockworkers struck for two and a
half months against the police and the National Guard, leading to a four day general
strike that shut down San Francisco.
Moreover, while socialists see the gains
of the welfare state as a continuation of
such movements, liberals tend to separate
those gains from the movements that actually achieved them, thereby creating a
false dichotomy between the past and the
present. In the liberal worldview, especially for the more technocratic liberals,
the tactics and bitter conflicts of the past
have no bearing on the present and more
important, arent necessary or even desirable. Hence the Democratic Partys status
for radicals as the proverbial graveyard of
social movements.

The Present

The inadequacies of liberalisms views

towards the past are directly related to its
inadequacies right here in the present. If
liberals fail to fully recognize the significance of the conflicts that have shaped
our history, how are they then supposed to
deal with the intricate power dynamics of
today?
One doesnt need to go as far back as
the 19th century, let alone the British enclosure riots of the 16th century, to find
bitter class conflict driving political and
economic change. Class conflict never
ended but instead it took on new forms,
from the rise of Regan and Thatcher (who
labeled British unions the enemy within ) in the 1980s to the Republican driven Right to Work laws of today. These
assaults on labor have largely worked, as
shown by the drastic decrease in private
sector union density from 25% in 1973
to 6.6% in 2014. As billionaire investor
Warren Buffett has admitted, Theres
class warfare, all right, but its my class,
the rich class, thats making war, and were
winning.

ISSUE I

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

When just 85 people have as much

wealth as half the entire population of the
earth, as an Oxfam study last year found ,
then something is seriously awry. Im sure
this is a sentiment that many liberals share;
wealth inequality isnt an exclusive issue
for socialists. We can both be disgusted by
obscene amounts of concentrated wealth
amid millions living in abject poverty. Nevertheless, despite the shared revulsion, the
differences in our responses are just as important. For when I look at the solutions
put forward by contemporary liberal politicians and policy wonks, I cant help but
think that they are entirely underwhelming, so underwhelming that they make the
liberal policies of the Great Society seem
downright utopian.
For example, take education, where the
most progressive idea to come out of the
Democratic Party was Elizabeth Warrens
failed bill to allow students to refinance
their loans to a lower interest rate. Instead
of drastically relieving the $1.2 trillion
student debt that young people currently
carry , that bill, while drafted in good faith,
basically amounted to the banks and the
government making slightly less money off
the backs of students.
Its moments exactly like that where the
socialist, dare I say Marxist, critique of the
commodification of higher education is
most urgently needed. Instead of just lowering the interest rates at which students
get placed into debt bondage, Americans
should be fighting for higher education to
be free and universal, to raise it to a basic
human right for the 21st century. Sounds
utopian, right?
Actually, its not. Chile recently passed
a law that would make all of higher education free by 2016, paying for it through an
increase in the corporate tax rate.
Of course, that huge achievement was
the result of nearly a decade of militant
organizing by Chilean students. At the
height of their campaign, Chilean students occupied college campuses for eight
straight months and organized rallies attended by nearly 800,000 people.
The drastic differences between Chile
and Americas approach to educational
injustice shows the inherent interconnectedness of any political ideologys vision
and tactics. Liberalism, by eschewing
both structural change and conflict-orientated organizing, is fundamentally unable to craft a political program capable
of achieving real results. It lacks both the

vision to imagine radical change and the

tactics to achieve that change. Thus, while
liberals obsess over the micro-politics of
filibuster votes and Supreme Court nominations, Chilean students are in the streets
making demands, using collective and
democratic action to achieve concrete, yet
ambitious goals.
That same combination of inadequate
vision and inadequate tactics can (unfortunately) be applied to most of the other
major issues we face today. From climate
change to unemployment, drone warfare
and the prison-industrial complex, liberal
thought has become utterly stagnant and
insufficient. And when an issue is as urgent
as climate change, liberalisms inadequacy
can quickly turn from the unimaginative
to the dangerous.

The Future
Above all, liberalisms greatest failure
has been its inability to provide an alternative to the present system, a way of moving
beyond capitalism. Despite all the progress
that has been made, capitalisms past contradictions still haunt us to this day.
For example, while it is objectively possible to feed every single person on earth
due to the productivity of world agriculture, 805 million people, approximately 1
in 9 of the earths population, still dont
have enough to eat. Our problems are not
economic or technological in nature, but
political. The question is not are we productive enough, but who controls our
collective productivity, and to what ends?
Will the collective productivity of humanity be controlled by an elite few at
the expense of the many, or will it be controlled democratically and equitably? In
liberalisms capitulation to capital and the
market, those are the questions that it fails
to ask. Moreover, the continued existence
of massive poverty amid massive prosperity points to a larger capitulationthe capitulation of the imagination.
In 1968, during the May 68 Movement,
radical French students protesting the government of Charles de Gaulle shouted All
power to the imagination. Their vision
was of world free of both want and the bureaucratic constraints of the state, a world
in which the creativity of humanity would
be the driving motor of society.
Now it seems that Margaret Thatchers
Theres no alternative has become the
slogan of capitalism in the 21st century.

Or to slightly misquote Winston Churchill,

another paragon of British conservatism,
Capitalism is the worst system except for
all the others. And liberalism, for all of its
good intentions, seems hell-bent on proving those two conservatives right.
To create a better world, we must leave
aside the narrowness of the liberal worldview and think about capitalism in historically defined terms. Capitalism had a
beginning and thus it must have an end.
There can be no infinite growth on a finite
planet. Of course, the question remains:
How exactly does humanity move beyond
capitalism?
It is precisely the aim of the socialist project to ask that question and then
answer itthrough the building of
movements and institutions capable of
achieving that world, a world beyond exploitation, whether in its class, race, gender or any other form. Cooperation, not
coercion, would be the economic basis of
this society. As the historian E. P Thompson put it, The aim [of socialism] is not
to create a socialist State, towering above
man and upon which his socialist nature
depends, but to create a human society
or socialized humanity where (to adapt
the words of More) man, and not money,
bearethe all the stroke.
If that sounds utopian, thats because
it is. And my greatest fear is that even the
most idealistic of todays liberals have
completely given up on any semblance of
achieving the world that Thompson once
described.
Let us not forget that liberalism had its
own utopian phase. Back in the 1950s and
60s people honestly thought that poverty, hunger, and unemployment would be
things of the past; that through managed
capitalist growth and social legislation the
future had already arrived. And then came
the 1970s, and with it OPEC, Watergate,
stagflation and the crisis of the welfare
state. The general state of liberal utopianism was inverted into one of cynicism
and pessimism, a state that has still persisted to this day.
But the socialist response to liberalisms
past failures is not to accuse it of naivet,
let alone stupidity or ignorance. The response is instead to show that the utopianism of liberalism was held back by liberalisms own structural limits. For to achieve
the world that liberals once thought was
possible, we must begin by thinking beyond liberalism itself.

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

ISSUE I

Selective Service and Women

Why We Need to Include Women in the Draft
VICTORIA HAMMITT
OUTREACH AND MEDIA DIRECTOR

On January 3rd, 2013, Secretary of

Defense Leon Panetta announced that
the ban preventing women from holding
combat jobs and positions in direct combat units would be lifted. The move was
not without controversy, and certainly
not instituted immediately, but standards
for all jobs in the military are to be approved as gender-neutral and in operation
by this fall, and full integration barring
exceptional circumstances is expected by
the end of the year.1 However, there was
another important implication of this historic move. It meant that the main legal
justification for distinguishing between
men and women for purposes of Selective
Service registration had been wiped away.
The modern draft was designed during
World War I, reinstated during World War
II, remained in place through the Cold
War, and was ended under Richard Nixon
in 1973. However, in 1980, Jimmy Carter
reinstituted the requirement for registration with the Selective Service System.
To perhaps the surprise of some, this requirement still exists. All men in the United States between the ages of 18 and 25
are required to register for the draft, and
failing to do so is a felonious offense that
can result in a fine of $250,000 or up to
five years in prison. No one has been prosecuted for failure to comply since 1986.2
However, according to a spokesperson for
the Selective Service, people are denied
financial aid, federal jobs, job training, security clearance and citizenship because
they failed to register by law, and these repercussions are permanent if the individuals do not register before they turn 26.3
Every single person penalized under this law is male. Conscription in the
United States has always been, and continues to be, used only for men. Due to
a shortage of military nurses, extending
the draft to women was considered during
WWII, and it was further discussed when
the registration was restarted in 1980
and several times since. At every juncture Congress has determined that the
draft should not be extended to women.
After the restart of registration in 1980,
several men brought a lawsuit claiming

that the policy was unfairly gender discriminatory. On appeal to the Supreme
Court in the case of Rosker v. Goldberg,
the Court ruled that because women were
not similarly situated to men in this issue,
in that they were barred from ground
combat roles (at the time), the differentiation based on gender was not unconstitutional. This case has been part of the
basis for the continued exclusion of women from Selective Service Registration.4
But on January 3rd, 2013, this argument was invalidated. As such,
it is time for the same laws that apply to men regarding registration for
Selective Service apply to women.
One may ask why this issue matters,
as we do not currently draft anyone nor
does it seem likely that the draft will be
reinstituted anytime in the near future.
But, if a situation were dire enough to
considering drafting, it seems clear that
the country would require the help of
all of its citizens, rather than only half.
Even opponents of the draft extension explain how a national emergency requiring serious consideration of conscription
would be the worst time to force the issue
of women being drafted.5 The time to
resolve the issue of women and the draft
is now, so that the system is in place and
ready to go should we ever need to use it.
More importantly, the codification
of the draft extension by Congress (and

an act of Congress would be necessary

to enact this extension) would be both
an important recognition by the legislature of the legitimacy of women in direct ground combat positions and a vital
symbolic move in the struggle for gender
equality in this country. The Washington
Post published an article on the issue in
late January, predicting renewed debate.6
However, the prediction generally did not
come to fruition. Another lawsuit was instigated to argue for the unfairness of this
discrimination, but has been dismissed.
So, the traditional arguments against
women in the draft still prevail on the
books and in the national consciousness.7
The first of these arguments is fairly obvious. Those opposed to women in
ground combat also oppose the draft extension, claiming that the military should
draw the line at the point of the bayonet
because women do not have an equal opportunity to survive, or to help fellow soldiers survive.5 However, it seems the best
people to determine the riskiness of the
change would be the military experts in
the Pentagon, who have determined that
all military roles should be open to anyone
regardless of gender. Women who are not
physically capable of ground combat positions would, in the case of the draft, be
assigned to other jobs in the military, exactly as it was done for men who were unable to hold combat positions in previous
c/o slate.com

ISSUE I

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

drafts. The perspective of keeping women

from the bayonet conveys that women
are people who need special protection,
which can have overwhelmingly negative
effects on the fight for gender equality.
But the more implicit argument made
by those opposed to the inclusion of women in the draft is that which relies on conceptions of womens traditional roles. A
pamphlet opposing the draft extension
during WWII reads, Women have a special responsibility for maintaining those
constructive influences in the home and
community necessary to the future of our
country and fundamental to the kind of
life which our men are fighting to maintain.8 While the main justification of
Congresss decision (when reinstituting
the Selective Service registration in 1980)
to act against President Carters suggestion to include women, was the ground
combat exclusion, they also cited the societal impact of the registration and possible induction of women.4 The Court
in Rosker exercised judicial deference to
the debate and decision of the legislature,
so upholding traditional gender roles was

at least indirectly a part of the decision.

Justice Marshall points this out in his dissent, observing that the opinion places its
imprimatur on one of the most potent remaining public expressions of ancient canards about the proper role of women.6
These ideas, that a womans proper
place is in the home, are among the most
pervasive and fundamental attitudes that
are preventing the progress of gender
equality. Part of the defeat of the Equal
Rights Amendment came from concerns
that inclusion in the military would disrupt womens abilities to be home-makers. Indeed, there have been efforts to
get Congress to reverse the Pentagons
decision and make exemptions for women in ground combat positions specifically so they can be spared the draft.
It is clear that the main thing at stake is
a schema of domination and privilege
that some are less than willing to let go
of. This is the societal impact Congress cited in 1981, and it is still dictating our laws. When we allow this attitude
to impact legislation, it is legitimized.
A national poll by Mason-Dixon Poll-

ing & Research, Inc. in 2013 showed that

59 percent of Americans believe that
women should be included in a draft,
with a margin of error of 3.2 percent.9
Additionally, although it was conducted in 1998, a report by the US General
Accounting Office showed that the budget for Selective Service would have to
be increased by under 20% to start registering women, $4.6 million at the time,
which would more than double the number of people on the national registry.10
With the inclusion, perhaps, of a provision that guarantees that both parents of
a child cannot be drafted, it is clear that
the time has come for draft registration to
expand to women: it is favored by a majority of the country, feasible, and a vital
step in the advance of womens rights.
Only men are currently subject to
the penalties of a failure to register for
the draft, and only men would be implicated in a national emergency should
the draft need reinstitution. This is one
of the last tools traditionalists have in
their arsenal to rationalize gender inequality, and it needs to be taken away.

Why I Refuse to Choose

A Wesleyan Students Journey to CPAC

HANNAH SKOPICKI
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Ill start out by saying that this isnt a

poor conservatives article. Yes, I am a
member of the Wesleyan Republicans.
Yes, I attended CPAC 2015. Yes, I go to
an extremely liberal institution. No, I am
not asking for pity and am not asking for
blame to be thrown. I am merely asking
us to rethink our preconceived notions
about each other and realize how similar
in theory liberals and conservatives really
are. I am asking for you to consider the
newest buzzword of the day, discourse.
In my brief semester and a half at university, one of the most common things Ive
heard is If you are a conservative, why did
you come to Wesleyan? This, among other
questions that are similar in nature, never
fails to astound me. Ignoring the first half
of that question, the answer is easy and
one Ive rehearsed a number of times. But
attaching the prior phrase has made me rethink all beliefs Ive held in regards to politics and my place at Wesleyan University.
This past February I had the privilege

and honor of attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)

in National Harbor, Maryland. Amidst
a crowd of young republicans hustling
to meet and greet Ben Carson, Donald
Trump, and Rand Paul, I found myself
questioning, What made me so inexplicably different than these people that they
ended up at more conservative schools,
and I at a historically extremely liberal
one? Are our ideologies so different that
we were driven to not even consider attending each others school? I decided to
dig deeper into this curiosity and began
talking to other young republicans attending the conference. I realized quickly that
the young republicans believed that issues
like healthcare and aid, do deserve to be
granted to all citizens. They just believe
in a different way of implementation than
their liberal counterparts. This resonated
with me, as I discovered that Wesleyan
students also cared deeply about the same
issues as the republicans Ive spoken to.
When I was a little girl my dad always
used to say, People to my left think Im
too conservative. People to my right think

Im too liberal. Now as I become more

and more invested in politics and the people involved in political policy-making,
I identify with the recognition of identification being a spectrum. I understand
that there will always be people to the left
and the right of me, and how I personally identify is based on the situation Im in.
At Wesleyan, I see myself leaning further
and further right. This is most likely due
to the fact that I find an increasing number of people identifying to my left. Surrounded by older, more rigid conservatives
at CPAC, I found myself identifying increasingly to the left. In talking to people
with similar views to myself, I find myself
constantly in flux, like I should be. Labels
can be helpful in certain circumstances
in helping to indicate people who share
similar beliefs. However, more often than
not, they tend to divide and polarize. Lets
stop pointing fingers and realize that at
some point on the spectrum, we all have
people we disagree with. This shouldnt be
seen as a negative though. Through conversation and open-mindedness, we can
all succeed in getting our voices heard.

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

10

ISSUE I

Women in American Government

COURTNEY WEIGAND
CONTRIBUTOR

While there has been much talk about

incorporating marginalized groups in politics from the media and academia, women continue to be extremely underrepresented in the U.S. government. Currently,
the United States ranks 95th in the world
for the percentage of women in its national legislature (Women). Our position in
this category has fallen over time, and
many countries that we consider repressive, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, rank
significantly higher, coming in at 53rd and
43rd, respectively (Women). These surprising figures call into question the quality of representation of the American government and lead us to wonder what, if
anything, should be done to rectify the situation. Would increased female representation in government truly benefit society?
Jane Mansbridges insight in her
1999 article of descriptive representation proves extremely helpful in this
area. In this article, Mansbridge defined
descriptive representation as the similarity of physical characteristics between
a representative and her constituency
(Mansbridge 1999). It is believed that by
sharing the same qualities, there will be
an overlap of personal experiences that
allows the representative to better represent a particular group. However, there is
a fear that focusing solely on descriptive
representation will lead to essentialism,
the assumption that all members of a particular group have the same experiences
and identity that no other person outside
the group can attempt to understand and
partake in (2). This exclusionary practice
could stimulate hostile feelings and create
tensions between groups, causing an environment unfavorable to compromise, and
therefore, unproductive and inefficient. In
contrast to this supposition, Mansbridge
offers various conditions under which descriptive representation could prove beneficial, such as in contexts of distrust due
to a history of subordination and uncrystallized interests when the a group
has not firmly defined its viewpoints (2).
Mansbridge asserts that descriptive representation can benefit groups in these situations because with shared experiences
and a personal stake in the interests of
a particular group, a representative can

better fight for

these interests on
the floor (1999).
While there are
many compelling reasons to
agree with the
importance of
an increased female presence
in
American
politics, it is difficult to imagine how to actually
change
the
situation.
The
situation isnt entirely
hopeless. Womens presence in
the political arena
has slowly increased over time, although
there is a growing partisan gap between
female politicians. Many political scientists have pinpointed the lack of gender
equality in politics to a lack of female
candidates. It has been shown that women can financially raise as much money as
their male opponents during campaigns
and win elections as often as men do.
Therefore, it isnt the quality of female
politicians that is absent from politics but
rather the number of qualified females
that choose to run for office. Many factors may contribute to the diminished
self-confidence evidenced by women
who, while qualified, choose not to run
for office. This decreased belief in ones
own political capability could potentially
be linked to young womens upbringing
and stereotypes present in the media.
Another question arises as to whether increased female participation in
government would benefit politics and
society as a whole. In terms of political
effectiveness, women have a legacy of
bipartisan cooperation, leading many
people to believe that a higher number
of female representatives would lead to
more compromise and, thus, greater congressional productivity. However, there
has been a remarkable shift in politics
that has negated this legacy and led to
the concept of gendered partisanship.
Gendered partisanship describes that situation where female politicians, due to
perceptions of their bipartisanship, have

ISSUE I

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

Classism and Wealth Inequality

A National Struggle Plays out at the University Level
CHRISTINA SICKINGER
STAFF

greater incentives to prove their partisan

loyalty. Due to an increasingly polarized
political environment, female politicians
have these incentives to demonstrate their
partisan support in order to win leadership roles and committee positions in
Congress. This phenomenon especially
affects Republican congresswomen because women are typically perceived as
veering more toward the left on the political spectrum. Therefore, Republican
congresswomen have extra desires to
prove their partisan loyalty. Consequently, an increased female presence in Congress could potentially exacerbate partisan conflicts and lead to greater tension
because of this gendered partisanship.
Therefore, the push for greater female
participation in Congress may not lead
to greater compromise, as many expect.
The question remains as to how to increase female participation in politics. But
an equally important debate arises: how
to ensure this greater presence does not
exacerbate tensions due to gendered partisanship. There are many important psychological and substantive reasons as to
why our country desperately needs greater female leadership. Increased female
participation could break down stereotypes, offer important viewpoints that are
lacking in Congress, and lead to increased
fairness in policy implementation. Thus,
it is important to discover ways of increasing female participation in government in
ways that benefit our society as a whole.
c/o theatlantic.com

11

The word class is a tricky term in

America. It is not a concept that Americans usually like to think or talk about.
Most people acknowledge class only by
identifying it as a part of the amorphous,
vague middle class. Having more or
less can sometimes be a point of guilt.
However, the middle class is not what it
once was. Wealth inequality is growing, and
as the saying goes, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. This
problem is starkly illustrated by the fact that
the top 20% of U.S. households own more
than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom
40% own merely 0.3% (Scientific American). The explanations for the growing gap,
which has been especially prominent since
the 1980s, range from the growth of technology to the lax restrictions on Wall Street.
But whatever the explanation, the wealth
gap is real, and its effects are everywhere.
For some time, Americans appeared
unwilling to address or change this trend.
Generally, Americans strive to join the rich,
not condemn them; the mythical American
Dream that hard work is all it takes to pull
oneself out of poverty and into wealth assures
us that it is possible. This seems to be changing since the recession and the subsequent
Occupy Wall Street movement, but class is
arguably still an uncomfortable topic and
thus does not get the attention that it should.
Despite Americas exceptional tolerance for wealth inequality, it is not something we can afford to ignore. As college
students, we are a part of a higher education system that is deeply intertwined
with inequality. Education can foster
inequality, and in turn, inequality has
visible, definitive effects on education.
The idea of wealth inequality usually conjures the concept of the 1% and
the 99%the exceptionally wealthy, and
everyone else. There are, however, two inequalities in America. Other than the familiar gap between the super-rich and everyone else, there is another gap between
those who are college-educated and those
who are not. So although collegeand
education in generalis often touted as
the solution to inequality, it only continues
to drive the problem, especially as long as
college remains unaffordable for many.

This is not to say that having a college education makes you a bad person, but that
it needs to become more accessible for all
if it is to become a vehicle for equality.
However, the opposite seems to be
happening. The growth in inequality creates challenges for institutions of higher
learning. As schools compete for those students who are able to pay the full sticker
price, they have to spend more to remain

ting tuition, usually the favored solution

for promoting accessibility of college education, is not the obvious fix that it seems,
especially for private institutions such as
Wesleyan that rely on financial aid. Rather, it simply creates more financial strain
on institutions, allowing them to admit
fewer low-income, aid-requiring students.
The relationship between education
and inequality appears to be a vicious cy-

competitive. Meanwhile, families who are

not able to pay in full require more and
more financial aid. The combination of
these factors creates a substantial financial challenge for colleges and universities.
As more students ask for more financial
aid, colleges are strained. Many institutions, Wesleyan included, no longer practice need-blind admissions. As resources
for financial aid begin to run low, students
who are able to pay full price receive more
attention. Even those institutions that are
nominally need-blind often employ practices that allow them to accept more of
those who are able to pay full price. Acceptances of international students or those
from the waitlist are not included in determining whether a college is need-blind, so
in recent years there has been a trend of
increases in admittances of these students.
Clearly, maintaining a socioeconomically diverse student body is a goal that
colleges should remain committed to. But
it is difficult when more and more students
are competing for finite financial aid. Cut-

cle. Inequality makes it harder for colleges

to provide adequate financial aid for everyone, and this in turn drives more inequality. How can this problem be addressed?
Catharine Hill, president of Vassar College,
argues that simply lowering tuition cannot
solve this societal problem. Instead, she
suggests offering subsidies for colleges with
high levels of diversity, which would ensure that colleges educate a socioeconomically diverse student body without forcing
them to cut costs. By genuinely addressing
the negative effects that income inequality
has on universities, government and society may be able to find a workable solution.
One does not have to look hard to find
evidence of inequality on Wesleyans campus. The lack of need-blind admissions, the
Wesleyan Class Confessions Facebook
page, and even the contention over Canada
Goose jackets are indications of inequalitys pervasive presence. Although these
have succeeded in drawing attention to the
issue, there is still a need for open, honest discussion if we want genuine change.
c/o theatlantic.com

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

12

ISSUE I

Abortion, Polarization, and

the Dissemination of the
Political Binary
JOSEPH NUCCI
EXECUTIVE EDITOR

When I say that I am pro-choice, what

does that exactly mean? What does it mean
to be pro-life? These terms are black and
white, and if you analyze them in blackand-white terms, it becomes apparent how
misleading they really are. A pure pro-life
stance would be that abortion is wrong no
matter the circumstances. Somebody whose
beliefs are so extreme believe that an abortion is wrong if the woman is a survivor of
rape, or even if a womans life is in danger.
If you believe this, you are in the minority. A
study published in 2012 by the Pew Research
Center (PRC) found that only 13 percent of
Democrats and 22 percent of Republicans
thought abortion should be illegal in all cases. A purely black-and-white view of a prochoice stance would be the opposite, yet just
as extreme. Being purely pro-choice would
mean that you believe that abortion is okay
at any given time during the pregnancy, up
until the day before delivery. If you believe
this, you are also in the minority. The same
study by the PRC found that only 26 percent
of Democrats and 11 percent of Republicans thought that abortion should be legal
in all cases; 63 percent of Democrats and 57
percent of Republicans had views that lay
somewhere in the middle, making neither
party united on the issue.
There are many examples that complicate the black-and-white rhetoric that surrounds the issue of abortion. Many people
believe that a beating heart and a working
circulatory system constitute life. After all,
first responders check for a pulse before they
do anything else in an emergency medical
situation. So, if a person believes that a fetus should be aborted prior to it developing
a beating heart (which is at about 6-7 weeks),
are they pro-choice or pro-life? This is significantly earlier than most abortion laws
cutoffs. Similarly, if a pregnant woman is
stabbed to death, doesnt it make sense to
charge the assaulter with double homicide?
A lot of pro-life supporters invoke this example as proof that life begins before delivery.

Is this selective rationalization or something

else? I am very skeptical of all or nothing
claims like these, and our polarizing language surrounding this issue makes it difficult, if not impossible, for a voters opinion
to translate into politics.
The Democratic Party platform uses the
word abortion four times. However, it does
not specify anything about putting limits on
abortion. It simply says that the government
has no business interfering with a womans
right choose. The Republican Party platform, on the other hand, mentions the word
abortion 19 times. Their platform discusses
the freedom that a faith-based institution has
to opt out of procedures that go against their
beliefs. They oppose taxpayer dollars to fund
or promote abortion practices and demand
that healthcare providers be required to care
for fetuses that survive an abortion because
they are aborted later in the pregnancy. They
want waiting periods so that the mother is
sure she wants to go through with it. I was
surprised to come across the line, We support the right of parents to consent to medical treatment for their children, including
abortion. Interestingly, We have here an explicit statement from the GOP that abortion
should be available. There was no mention

of banning abortion anywhere in the entire

platform. Their platform wrestles with the
shades of grey in an issue that is often seen
as black and white. The Democratic Party
platform states that abortion should always
be available, without providing any qualifications.
I do not agree with much of the GOP
platform regarding this issue. Money is an
important and influential factor in many
human rights issues, so denying public funding for abortions is directly infringing upon
a womans right to choose (after all, it is the
Republican Party who is fond of saying that
the government shouldnt interfere with our
freedoms). However, despite identifying as
pro-choice, I was surprised to find that the
Democratic Party platform endorses abortions in any and all forms. It does not specify if it matters when the fetus is aborted or
what the motives are. The Republican Party
platform, on the other hand, states, We call
for legislation to ban sex-selective abortions
gender discrimination in its most lethal
formand to protect from abortion unborn
children who are capable of feeling pain. I
personally have a problem with sex-selective
abortions and with performing abortions on
fetuses that can feel pain.
c/o nytimes.com

ISSUE I

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

I also believe that a healthcare provider

should not be coerced to perform an act they
believe to be morally wrong. These are views
that are in line with the Republican Party
platform, yet I believe in a womans right
to choose, which is in line with the Democratic platform. The pro-choice and pro-life
rhetoric that surrounds the issue of abortion
puts me, as a voter, in between a rock and a
hard place. It is my opinion that Democrats
should confront these aspects of abortion
in their platform and that the Republicans
need to stop saying they are pro-life when
their platform is undeniably pro-choice (in
the sense that they believe abortions should
be available; either that or change the platform). Of course, some politicians do operate in the extremes, but the majority of the
American people do not. I would also like to
point out that the Democrats get the governments hands off my body mentality,
to me, feels very libertarian and intuitively
makes a lot of sense. Since this issue is so
contentious and since there are so many
nuances to be made, perhaps letting people
do what they feel to be morally sound is the
answer. However, Democrats often advocate for government spending on abortion
practices, which seems to be a profound belief in government involvement about what
people can and cannot do with their bodies.
Considering that the majority of the American people believe that some restrictions on
abortion practices are appropriate, I am not
so sure that the Democratic rhetoric holds
up. It doesnt make sense to me to argue that
taxpayers, who have varying beliefs on this
issue, should have to fund any and all abortion decisions that may be made.
This is not meant to solely be about abortion, but about the polarizing language that
surrounds the issue of abortion. The rhetoric they use distracts from the nuances that
can and should be discussed, openly and
honestly. Something that the Republicans
and Democrats do very well is re-labeling
political stances. Anti-abortion becomes
pro-life. Pro-abortion becomes pro-choice,
so pro-life is necessarily anti-choice. This
all or nothing way of thinking is polarizing
and distracts from the conversations that
should be had surrounding these issues to
facilitate cooperation and progress in our
country. Our government doesnt just do
this with abortion issues. The religious right
in our country famously and ingeniously
turned the anti-gay marriage stance into
a pro-traditional family one. This made
it possible for Americans to be against gay
marriage without being homophobic. It is
my personal opinion that politicians are per-

fectly aware of how polarizing their tactics

are and that they are content with letting the
media propagate this us versus them mentality. This mentality is dangerous because it
disseminates a narrative that is not entirely
accurate. It also distracts the American people and turns them into single-issue voters.
To be pro-life is not necessarily to be a misogynist. Pro-choice is not synonymous with
baby killer. The question we should be
asking is not whether one is pro-life or prochoice, but rather under what circumstances
should abortions be allowed and why do we
judge these qualifications the way we do?
Labels are important in both politics and
in life, but it is my opinion that the way we
label political views in such black-and-white
terms is growing increasingly problematic. In
2014, the PRC found that partisan animosity has increased substantially. In each party,
the share with a highly negative view of the
opposing party has more than doubled since
1994. Most of these intense partisans believe
the opposing partys policies are so misguided that they threaten the nations well-being. This finding is especially curious given
that neither party is united on abortion issues. Of course, abortion is just one issue out
of many, and there are many issues that cannot be picked apart like this one, but I think
the legality of abortion is illustrative of how
misleading our political language can be. I
believe that this polarization of our country
has increased due to a reliance on such terms
that lack a middle ground. This language is a
bipartisan issue, not a single-party issue. It is
broadcasted from both sides.
In their groundbreaking book The Radical
Center, Ted Halstead and Michael Lind suggest that our countrys polarizing language is
a symptom of an underlying problem. They
make the claim that our polarization stems
from how we run elections. Candidates have
to pander to the extremes, who are usually
the minorities, of their respective parties in
the primaries. They have to pander to the
purely pro-life or purely pro-choice people
who view political issues in a narrow-minded
way, good and bad, us and them. So, when
it comes time for the election, they have a
hard time winning votes from people across
the aisle because they had to appeal to the
radicals of their party to get through the first
stage. A prime example of this is Jeb Bushs
candidacy. He is refusing to pander to the
Christian right, but many predict he will not
make it through the primaries. This is not an
original idea. Politicians have been changing
their views to get votes since politics became
a vocation. The media recently caught on
to Obamas flakiness concerning marriage

13

Can Fetuses Feel Pain?

The research on this has
varied. Some studies suggest
that fetuses are incapable of
feeling pain but admit that
their findings do not determine the morality of abortion
practices. Others suggest that
the fetus can feel pain as early
as 8 weeks but its unclear how
much the opinions of these
experts were politically motivated. Some research shows
the fetus can feel pain at 20-25
weeks.
How Do State Laws on
Abortion Vary?
It is worth noting that 8
states have no restrictions on
when an abortion can be performed, 21 states impose prohibitions at fetal viability (meaning that the fetus, at about 20
weeks, can survive outside the
womb). Only 3 states ban abortions in the third trimester and
the remaining 18 have varying
rules.

equality. He was originally in favor of samesex marriage in 1996, retracted this claim
from 2004-12, and then came out in favor of
it again. The Saturday Night Live Weekend
Update with Seth Meyers summarized the
presidents back and forth quite beautifully
when he stated that Obama had finally been
outed as a Democrat. It seems unlikely
that Obama flip-flopped internally; his true
views seem to have been compromised by
playing politics. If we are going to grow as
a nation, we have to go vehemently against
the narrative that our nation is polarized
and must aim for the middle ground. This
black-and-white mentality of Republicans
versus Democrats isnt getting us anywhere.
If anything, its holding us back. In the social sciences, it is often acknowledged that so
much of what we consider to be a binary is
often a spectrum. For some reason, we insist
on viewing political identity as a binary. Political identities are not binaries; they exist on
a spectrum, and if we want to fix American
politics, its time we started treating them as
such.

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

14

ISSUE I

ISSUE I

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

15

Dollars in Democracy
Part 1: SuperPACs
DAN KIM
CONTRIBUTOR

Lobbying. Its a loaded word that can

mean many things. Google defines lobbying as seek[ing] to influence (a politician or official) on an issue.1 For some,
lobbying is a morally grey but necessary
area of democracy; a requirement to represent otherwise underrepresented voices in
the political process. For
others, it is tabooa
dirty word synonymous with corruption.
Regardless of what
one might think about
lobbying, its magnitude
(solely in terms of campaign contributions) has
seen a marked increase
since the Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission decision in 2010. That decision ruled in favor of
unlimited
corporate
donations to political
campaigns as long as
neither the candidate
nor the party is involved. Justice Anthony
Kennedy wrote for
the majority, saying:
The [Supreme] Court
has recognized that the
First Amendment applies to corporations
and extended this protection to the context
of political speech.2
The major implication of the decision
was that it opened the floodgates for increased super political action committee
(PAC) involvement in political races. A
PAC is organized for the purpose of raising and spending money to elect and defeat candidates. Most PACs represent
business, labor or ideological interests. 3
Vis--vis the Citizens United decision,
PACs can now make contributions without limits or restrictions on the sources
of funds for independent expenditures
(i.e. not directly donated to candidate or
party committees) in federal races (PACs

are still limited in the amount of direct

contributions they are allowed to give and
receive).4 Explicit collaboration between
super PACs and candidate/party committees is illegal (explicit being the key word).
The Citizens United case was not the
only landmark decision in which the U.S.
courts sided with facilitating more corporate involvement in political races. In

number of super PACs has exploded, as

has their spending on political races. According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), as of March 09, 2015, 1,340
groups organized as Super PACs have
reported total receipts of $696,002,318
andtotal independent expenditures of
$348,545,054 in the 2014 cycle [alone].7
In 2010, the CRP reports that out-

According to a faculty study from

the University of Mississippi, the answer is a resounding yes. Three professors there found that corporate lobbying has a significant positive effect
on the contributor. The paper reads:

Buckley vs. Valeo (1967), while the Supreme Court held that campaign contributions be limited, the SCOTUS held that
spending money to influence elections is
a form of constitutionally protected free
speech.5 More recently, the decision in
McCutcheon vs. FEC (2014) ruled that,
though contributors are still limited in how
much they give to a candidate or a party
committee in a federal race, a single contributor is no longer capped on how many
candidates and party committees he/she
can give to in a given election cycle.6
However, since Citizens United, the

side spending (which includes political

expenditures from any groups or individuals, like super PACs and excludes
candidate and party committee fundraising) hovered a little over $315 million. In the 2012 election cycle, that
figure reached around $1.03 billion.
The 2014 midterm cycle saw a considerable dropdown to about $550 millionbut still well past the 2010 mark.8
So what? What effect does all of
this money have on the political process? Does this money equate to political influence (and therefore power)?
c/o fbdecanter.com

the market value of an extra dollar spent on prior period lobbying is roughly $200.
This estimate coupled with the
sample mean of annual lobbying expenditures ($1.273M) indicates lobbying can increase
shareholder wealth by roughly
$253M per year. Hence, lobbying appears to be a worthwhile
investment, especially given the
market value of research and
development expenditures and
average internal rates of return
on other corporate investments
The investment value of an extra dollar spent on lobbying implies

that whatever bill or initiative toward

which the money lobbies is resolved in
favor of the lobbyist. In other words,
politicians are overwhelmingly committed to do the bidding of their lobbyists, resulting in clear monetary gains
for the lobbyisteven more so than
other forms of corporate investment.
Though the analysis above is
not specific to campaign contributions, the incentives still apply.
From the perspectives of both corporations and politicians, it makes sense to
lobby and to listen to lobbyists. If a politician is able to be influenced in such a
way that the politician will create laws
and regulations so heavily in favor of a
corporations interests that that company
sees a return rate of up to 200 times the
amount invested, it makes absolute sense
to lobby through campaign contributions.
And if a corporation or an influential person spent hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to get you
elected (through TV spots, attack ads
against opponents, events, sponsors,

etc.), there is at least an implicit understanding that, once in office, you

owe that donor some political favors.
You wouldnt be there in the first
place without their help. And if push
came to shove, big-money supporters
would not be slow in reminding you of
that fact, especially if you wanted to get
re-elected. The study above shows that
politicians are indeed responsive to the
interests of their investors, given the
rates of return those donors experience.
Immense amounts of money from
super PACs are flooding in to support
politicians. The implications of lobbying are up for debate. However, it seems
that lobbying provides a significant
amount of political clout going to those
with the greatest wealth. Based on the
reasoning above, politicians are more
likely to defer to the interests of big industries and corporations. It is worth
noting that politicians are also affected
by the voters themselves. But undoubtedly, money is power. And right now,
the road to Washington is paved green.
c/o fbdecanter.com

16

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

One of the most pressing

political matters facing us is
increasing student loans.
Jessica Brennan 17

I would have to say it is mass

incarceration of men of color.
Aleyda Castro 18

I think todays most pressing

political issue is how to combat
terrorism and international
affairs... and also another
critical political issue is that
of the uprising of violent
riots following the Black Lives
Matter movement.
Emmakristina Sveen 17

What Do You Think Is the Most

Pressing Issue in Politics Today?

I think that one of

the most pressing
political issues is
the problem of
genocide
Emily Feher 17

The most important political

issues to me are womens rights
and global warming.
Hannah Fritze 18

As young people, I think the most

pressing political issue is how we dont
fully understand how the government
itself works.
Hazem Fahmy 17

I think one of the most important

political issues facing us is the
inequality of men and women in this
country. We should work on closing the
wage gap and the opportunity gap.
Ryan Dobrin 18

I think equal access to

education is essential,
not only for students
lives today, but because
it will have lasting
impacts on our country
in years to come.
Sonya Bessalel 18

Healthcare is one of the

most pressing political issues
facing us right now.
Jackson Barnett 18

I would have to say income

inequality and distribution of
wealth in the U.S.
Alison Denzer-King 16

I think the most pressing political

issues facing us are the debates on
gay marriage and abortion.
Linne Halpern 18

17

Institutionalized racism is
the most pressing political
issue facing us.
Shayna Bryce 18
The Supreme Court
Decision on same-sex
marriage is one of the
most pressing political
issues.
Nikki LeFlore 16
I believe the most
pressing issue is racial
injustice, which has
severe physiological and
psychological impacts
on our society.
Ali Jamali 17

The most pressing political issue facing us right now is the

extreme increase of income inequality in this country. Compared
to other countries and especially in recent times, the rich have
been getting richer at much higher rates than the lower and
middle classes.
Compiled by Hannah Skopicki
Matthew Renetzky 18

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

18

ISSUE I

Presidential Power
The President of the United States holds
a unique role dissimilar to many other positions of powereven of executives of other
countriesa power unlike any other branch
in our government. And expectations of the
public, press, and government cant truly be
met with the power the president actually has.
When things go wrong, the president is often
blamed, and when things go right, the president is often praisedas though unilateral
action alone caused the problem or success.
Although the power of the president has increased throughout time, the expectations we
as an American public place on the POTUS
are ultimately misguided and too high.
Much of the American public doesnt realize the American president was actually constitutionally designed to have relatively little
power in comparison to the other branches
and that the president
has few formal powers.
The president is the
commander in chief,
with ultimate control
over military and navy
action, and the chief
of state, a symbol of
the American people.
The POTUS is executive in chief, with the
power to appoint various governmental officials and to make sure
laws are executed. The
president is the chief of
party, the chief citizen,
and chief administrator. But those powers
are it. He cant force a
gridlocked Congress to
act, he cant determine
constitutionality,
he
cant force foreign allies
or enemies to obey.
Admittedly, the power of the president has
increased over time through a combination of
factors. First, the presidents have given themselves power. There has been an increase in
the number and expansiveness of executive
orders, a mandate by the president to the
executive branch similar to laws but without
congressional approval, like Obamas immi-

gration executive order and Bushs executive

orders on surveillance post-September 11,
2001. There has also been an increase in signing statements, in which a president signs a
bill but suggests that he disagrees with it. Congress has also increased the POTUSs power
by deferring to him in times of military conflict. Thus the president ultimately commands
more than his formal powers suggest.
But this increase of power isnt realistic
to the even higher-powered president we
American people envision. This falsity of an
American president is multi-factored as well.
The true power that the president created is
often over-credited by the president himself,
especially in good times, to reap political benefit and to seem like a strong public figure.
The delegation of power by Congress to the
president has also given the public unrealistic
expectations. That delegation only occurs in
time of conflict. Post-9/11 President Bush
was able to get away with a lot more than he

an actual increase of the presidents power,

and perceived increase of presidential power
creates a phenomenon Dartmouth political
scientist Brendan Nyhan dubs the Green
Lantern Theory of the Presidency. This
theory can be broken into two sub-theories,
the Lyndon Johnson Theory and the Ronald
Reagan Theory. The Green Lantern Theory rests on the idea that if the president isnt
achieving something, its because of a lack of
will to push through Congress, unlike LBJ, or
a lack of persuasive power over the American
people, unlike Reagan. But this ignores the fact
that being persuasive to the American people
as a whole is difficult when the American public is becoming more and more polarized and
persuasive skills are less important than simply
being in the same party, things Regan didnt
have to deal with as much. It also ignores that
LBJ might have been so successful at passing
bills because Congress was strongly democratic in both the House and the Senate at the
AMELIA SPITTAL
STAFF

would have if Americas future hadnt been so

uncertain, people hadnt been so scared, and
the nation hadnt been unsafe. Finally, the media has influenced opinion through its favorite
narrative of the president in media: a hero, or
at least one of extreme strength like in House
of Cards or The West Wing.
This combination of a lack of understanding of what powers the president actually has,

19

Gender and the Wage Gap

How Much Is Too Much?

MAILE MCCANN
STAFF

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

ISSUE I

time and because LBJ was profiting politically

from Kennedys death (Klein n.p.).
Thus, when the presidents fall short at
achieving things promised on their campaigns, we need to stop being so surprised.
They didnt achieve their goals not because
they didnt try hard enough but because they
didnt have the power to succeed in the first
place.
c/o brunchnews.org

The existence of the wage gap and

workplace gender discrimination in the
United States is a growing problem. Extensive research, done by organizations
such as the Institute for Womens Policy
Research, the International Labor Organization, and the American Association of
University Women, has provided us with
the cold, hard facts about the gender pay
gap. On average, among full-time, yearround workers, women earn 78 cents for
every dollar earned by their male counterparts. In some states, this gap is even
higher. In Louisiana, for example, women
are paid just 66% of what men are paid.
Unsurprisingly, this gap is even worse for
women of color and for women over 35.
When looked at over the span of an entire working life, these numbers mean an
American woman will earn $1 million less
than a man. That is an amount that few
women can afford to miss, and one that
none should have to.
So why is this the reality of American
employment? When all else is equal between male and female workers, from skill
to effort to level of education, why would a
woman be paid a significant amount less?
It is the result of discrimination: compa-

nies refusing to give equal pay, promote,

or even hire women despite their qualifications solely because those in charge believe that they are inferior because of their
sex. Though this is the most obvious form
of workplace gender inequity, the WAGE
project, which works to end discrimination
against women in the American workplace
and inspire people to enact this change
quickly, points out that prejudice appears
in multiple forms. One form that may not
always be considered is sexual harassment,
which causes many women to leave their
jobs or lose them because of decreased
emotional stability and ability to work under such conditions. Another is the taxation of motherhood, which is the common
practice of mothers being paid less and being seen as unreliable and un-promotable
simply because they decided to have kids.
Although parenthood does usually mean
less time dedicated to a job, men who become fathers are not regarded with this
same bias.
As with any movement, the first step to
creating the desired changes comes from
the acknowledgement of the problem.
That is why a large part of mobilizing the
movement toward gender equality in the
workplace has come from a more universal
awareness of the inequality in existence.
Recently, many of Hollywoods elite have

spoken out against the wage gap and become part of the pushback, which has generated a wider acknowledgement of wage
inequities in all professions. During the
2015 Oscars, actress Patricia Arquette addressed the issue in her acceptance speech
for Best Supporting Actress, saying, To
every woman who has given birth, to every
taxpayer and citizen of this nation. Its
our time to have wage equality once and
for all and equal rights for women in the
United States of America.
Especially with this increase in awareness, change is more possible than ever.
Individuals can learn better negotiation
skills to try to gain fair pay by direct confrontation. Companies can better monitor pay differences by carrying out salary
audits. And as a nation, we can pass the
Paycheck Fairness Act, a piece of proposed
legislation that would vastly improve the
Equal Pay Act (which hasnt been updated since 1963) by creating motivations for
employers to obey the law, amplifying enforcement of the act on a federal level, and
banning retaliation against workers who
question wage policies.
To me, it is obvious why the pay gap
needs to be eliminated; it just doesnt make
any sense. After centuries of being seen as
the inferior sex and being discriminated
against because of it, women have proved
time and time again that we are just as
capable as men and that we deserve absolute equality. Carly Fiorina, former CEO
of Hewlett-Packard, once said, Ive never thought in terms of men do this and
women do that. This is the mindset that
all women and girls should have, and yet
it is hard to think this way with something
like unequal pay basically declaring that
you are not as valuable. It is shameful to
think that in a country like the United
States, a country that has always stood for
justice, an unfairness as prominent as the
wage gap would still hold true today. Yes,
change is happening, not only in the U.S.
but also throughout the world, in places where gender discrimination is much
harsher. But if this change continues at the
same glacially slow pace it has for the past
five decades, statistics show that the wage
gap wont close in the U.S. for another 45
years and globally for another 70. This
amount of time is unacceptable. Women
deserve equal pay now. We need to work
to close this gap now. In doing so, we will
better our entire society.
c/o aauw.org

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

20

ISSUE I

Houses Divided

A Look at American Political Division

AIDAN BERKELY
CONTRIBUTOR
The eeriest spot in Spain is the Valle de los Cados, the Valley of the Fallen. An hours drive northwest of Madrid, the worlds tallest cross rises atop
a mountain ridge. Beneath it, carved
into the mountain lies a massive Catholic Basilica. Ordered by Generalissimo
Franco to commemorate the Spanish
Civil Wars dead (and built by prisoners of war), the complex holds his
tomb and 40,000 other soldiers from
all sides. The architecture is perhaps
best described as primitive fascist, with
massive stone arches, baroque imagery,
and shrines to the patron saints of the
armed forces. Walking through the
poorly lit nave you feel history and the
mountain itself weighing you down.
Until 2011, it was nearly impossible to visit the Valle. The controversy

is complex but rooted in Spains recent

history. In the 1930s Spain fought a
bloody civil war, whose legaciesdecades of political repression, militant
separatist movements, abrupt democratization, attempted coupsremain vividly real today; most modern political
issues can trace their roots to this conflict. The question of the Valle is about
what aspects of this period to commemorate, and how to remember them.
Consensus seems impossible, at least
as long as the vivid memories endure.
Spain is far from alone here. Across
the globe, decades-old traumas echo
into modern political discourse. In
South Africa, to name one example,
the ruling African National Congress
rides its reputation as the opponent of
Apartheid to power, regardless of its
institutional failings; many of its opponents likewise represent Apartheid-era
constituencies. Argentina and Chile

are still prosecuting human-rights cases dating back to their military juntas
of the 1980s. The trauma can even
become international: one reason for
Greeces anger at the Eurozone bailout
is Germanys harsh line, which evokes
memories of the brutal Nazi occupation. Political scars do not heal easily,
and in many countries with histories
of bitter political violence the social
fabric remains damaged decades later.
The question, then, is why we see
the same pattern in the United States,
where it is common for political commentators to insist on an Us-vs.-Them
dynamic. Perhaps the most visible example in recent times was Sarah Palins
comments about the real America.
But while Wesleyan students, many of
who might not meet Governor Palins
criteria, may dismiss this as another
manifestation of what the great historian Richard Hofstadter labeled the
c/o usnews.com

ISSUE I

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

Paranoid style in American Politics,

we should remember that this tendency
crops up all across the aisle. One of the
first moments of political satire I can
recall cropped up in 2004, when electoral maps appeared on the Internet depicting the borders between the United
States of Canada (Kerry states) and a
nation variously labeled Jesusland, the
United States of Texas, or Dumbfuckistan (Bush ones). The division exists,
and is apparently growing: multiple
studies indicate that America self-segregates along ideological lines, down to
the county level. What makes this vitriol so surprising is its dual lack of cause.
On the one hand, and in spite of regular
pronouncements by politicians seeking
re-election, the substantive difference
between Democrats and Republicans
is small by global standards (Americas
actual political spectrum is much broader, but most alternative viewpoints, Tea
Party aside, have a snowballs chance
in the Sahara of winning office). But
if theres no obvious practical reason,
neither is there a clear historical trigger.
We can, of course, search for one.
Were unlikely to find a suitable foreign
crisis: the US has been remarkably successful there. With good reason, World
War Two entered the national mythos
as a noble act; the Cold War ended in
conclusive victory; anyone who experienced 9/11 remembers a national
moment of unity, while Iraq and Afghanistan happened outside most of
our visceral experiences. Nor is there
a domestic equivalent. Even the Great
Depression only produced a moment of
class division, while United States has
also been generally free of coups, insurrections, or sustained armed struggles.
The greatest exception, the Civil War, is
now a century and a half gone; the last
surviving soldiers passed away in the
1950s. Which is not to deny the Civil
Wars lasting effects. To some extent,
history chains us all. But even living in
the southern US, where it isnt uncommon to hear talk of the War of Northern Aggression or see Confederate

bumper stickers, Id hesitate to suggest

that most people view politics in so deep
a context. The connection simply isnt
there. The Civil War is no longer real.
The obvious objection, of course, is
the Civil Rights Movement in its various manifestations. Violence, stark divisions, partial resolutionit certainly
resembles, in several aspects, other nations national traumas. Especially in
light of the Ferguson movement, one
could easily argue that America is still
fighting the battles of the 1960s. The
electoral map is largely a byproduct
of Nixons southern strategy. And yet,
without wanting to minimize either the
oppression meted out to so many groups
or the ongoing nature of the debate, I
dont think it meets our criteria. In all
the countries described above, the conflict survives across generations and
transient political issues. In the United
States however, regardless of material
progress, ideologically the activists won.
Think of the language of political
discourse today. In most respects, it
represents a victory for the Civil Rights
Movements. For the most part, it is no
longer acceptable in mainstream America to actively argue for discriminatory
policies. Which is not to say that such
policies have disappeared (they havent),
but defending them now requires a covering justification besides the intended effects. Even if the racism, sexism,
homophobia, and other biases survive
in hidden or coded manners, that they
must be coded tells us something. Every
time the language seeps to the surface, it
is denied, re-contextualized, apologized
for. Whatever you think of the tangible state of affairs, this is a remarkable
transformation. Whether it went too far
or not far enough is another question,
but its hard to frame the Civil Rights
Movement as an enduring schism in
American politics, because our political language accepts its victories.
The near future may, of course, prove
me wrong. As America becomes more
polarized, it feels that some major ideological swing, either to the left or right,

21

is coming; should this occur, then maybe well look back on the Aughts as a
turning point of this deep struggle. But
we can only judge the present. And the
present reveals stark political divisions
of the sort usually associated with some
past traumaand no plausible source.
But that apparent harmony is itself
a product of the American national
narrative. Im not historian enough to
outline that narrative here, but I suspect
most readers can imagine the basics:
Manifest Destiny; Melting Pot; Life,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Although meanings change over time,
the American story is usually told as a
progression, ascending towards the City
Upon A Hill. And while many countries have their national myths, I cant
think of many as self-consciously harmonious conceptions as the American
one. By nature, this leaves little room for
dissent within the American dream. Its
a tautology: America is welcoming and
improves itself, so if you have imagine
and strive for a better America, youre
pro-America, just like everybody else.
When everybody appears to be on the
same side, dissent seems to disappear.
The Civil War is a popular subject in
the United States, especially given the
recent anniversaries. But American history is turbulent enough without it, if
we would only remember. How many
Americans know anything about the violent labor struggles of the 20th century, the end of Reconstruction, Bleeding
Kansas or the Indian Wars? Even the
turmoil of the 60s, still within living
memory, is glossed over. While other
countries cant agree how to remember
their pasts, in America we recall too
clearly. And as a result, we marginalize the disagreements that forged our
country. For all the unity that it fosters,
it comes with a downside: when Americans disagree, its often hard to enunciate why the two sides feel so far apart.
Instead we feel like enemies, and cant
explain why. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, maybe a little schism,
now and then, is healthy for a country.

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ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

22

ISSUE I

The Hero the Republicans Need

Not the One They Deserve

MATTISON ASHER
CONTRIBUTOR
The Republican Party desperately needs to change. Politicians on both
sides of the aisle have realized that the
Republican Party is struggling to establish an identity in the second decade of
the 21st century. After the 2012 elections, Republicans were faced with (and
are now currently facing) an identity
crisis. Would they entrench themselves

in social conservatism, hawkish foreign

policy, and attempt to slash the deficit,
all emboldening of the policies they
have supported for almost two decades?
Or will they heed to the demands of
change, potentially drastically altering
their voting coalition?
While they may have done well in the
last mid-term elections, their wins came
mostly from a rejection of Obamas foreign policy, a slight rise in the distaste for
Obamacare, and low Democrat turnout

numbers, not because the Republican

message excited America. In 2012,
voters between the ages of 18 and 40
almost made up half of the voting electorate while in 2014 they made up only
32% of all voters. The message behind
these numbers is that, in elections where
young people and minorities dont vote,
Democrats have a much higher chance
of losing the election. The Republicans
cannot count on the fact that younger
people and minorities will not show up
c/o infowars.com

ISSUE I

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

if they want to have an effective strategy

for winning in a future America that is
less white, more socially liberal, and not
as old.
The current policy stances that many
Republicans hold are no longer popular with the general public. A poll conducted by CNN on February 12-15 displayed that 63% of Americans believe
that same sex marriage is a constitutional right while 36% of Americans
opposed it as a right. 2014 marked
the first year when more people identified as pro-choice than as pro-life.
While the Republicans want to keep
the Evangelical Christian part of their
coalition happy, the opinions that most
Americans hold on social issues contrast
the Republicans current platform and
will hurt the Party more and more every
election cycle if the trends continue.
Enter Rand Paul, a republican presidential candidate that has garnered a
lot of attention from the media for being a non-traditional Republican. He
first made headlines when he performed
a 13-hour filibuster on drones, a symbolic gesture that displays his support
for less intervention in foreign spheres
. Since 2013, the brand recognition of
Rand Paul has skyrocketed. Rand Paul
was one of the most googled republican names in 2014 and was only second
to Chris Christie (who was most likely
googled because of the bad press he received on Bridgegate). Rand Paul even
made the cover of Time magazines October 16th issue, The Most Interesting
Man in Politics. He is increasingly being seen as the main wild card in the republican primary, and for good reason.
Rand Pauls stance on a myriad of
subjects displays his fundamental differences with the Republican Party yet also
portrays his willingness to cooperate
within the Republican policy structure.
Rand Paul is against a constitutional
amendment that would allow gay couples to marry, but believes it should be
open for the states to decide. Paul has
stated that abortion should be illegal,
but also admits there are thousands of
exceptions to any abortion ban. While
Rand opposes the war in Iraq, the war
in Afghanistan, and the embargo on
Cuba, he also admits that Israel is an essential ally in the Middle East and must
be supported. The reformer admits that
the GOP is too eager for war, but points
out Hillary is as well. Some of the boldest claims Rand Paul has made, claims

that other politicians have been too fearful to make, are that our justice system
is institutionally racist, that the war on
drugs has been a pyrrhic victory at best,
and that police reform is a necessity .
While clearly a conservative, Rand
Pauls views make him more interesting
as a republican candidate. Unlike most
of the other potential republican candidates, he is much less hawkish when
it comes to foreign policy and is much
more conservative when it comes to
government intervention in the economy and in the private lives of American
citizens. He is someone who can take
the Republican Party into a new electoral age, effectively changing the base
of the party.
The demographics are against Republicans. The country is getting less
white and younger, and therefore the
primary voting bloc for the Republicans
is decreasing. They must find political
stances that will satisfy their establishment base while at the same time changing certain policy stances in order to attract new voters for their coalition. One
way Rand Paul is successfully re-branding the Republican Party is admitting
the failures of governments in areas
where other politicians have refused to
face reality: Michael Browns death
and the suffocation of Eric Garner in
New York for selling untaxed cigarettes
indicate something is wrong with criminal justice in America. Paul admits
Theres a racial outcome to the war on

23

drugs. Three out of four people in prison for nonviolent drug offenses are black
and brown ... [even though] white kids
are using drugs at the same rate black
kids are and claims that I will continue to fight to end the racial disparities in
drug sentencing. I will continue to fight
lengthy, mandatory sentences that prevent judges from using discretion. I will
continue to fight to restore voting rights
for non-violent felons whove served
their sentences. No other politician has
spoken about Ferguson or the death of
Michael Brown in such a direct way, admitting that the government is to blame
for institutional racism. The Republican
Party has always been viewed as being
apathetic to minority issues, but Rand
Pauls fight against the institutional racism embedded in our laws, such as the
higher punishments for possessing crack
(which is used more by minorities and
people of low income) comparatively to
cocaine (which is used more by whites
and people of high income), displays
an honest attempt by a Republican to
represent his black constituents in a
meaningful way. By fighting against Big
Government in attempting to dismantle the war on drugs, Rand Paul is also
potentially expanding the appeal of the
Republican Party to those who are most
affected by the war on drugs.
While around 50% of the country
wants to put troops in Iraq in order to
fight the Islamic State , a policy that
Rand Paul would not be in support of,

c/o pinterest.com

24

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

this call to action is most likely a knee

jerk reaction and will subside by the
time the primaries roll around for a
number of reasons. With low oil prices
and a growing international coalition
that is set on the destruction of the Islamic State, the Islamic States power
should dwindle in the next year. They
will not be able to garner nearly as
much revenue from the sale of oil, and
their extremist nature will continue to
isolate potential allies as well as create
more enemies. This belief may be well
founded, but Rand Pauls largest potential weakness with the Republican base
is his foreign policy. Recently his disagreement with much of the Republican Party has come to a forefront in the
debate over the upcoming budget proposal. Rand Paul reacted to Marco Rubios bill to increase defense spending:
I think it is irresponsible and dangerous to the country to borrow so much
money to add into defense. While this
sort of statement may attract liberals
and independents in supporting Paul,
his belief in a less interventionist state
will be the hardest point to convince the
republican establishment on.
Rand Paul is a true conservative in
that he doesnt believe that the government should be interfering with ones
private life. He garners support from
Tea Partiers because of his unabashed
attack on Big Government interfering in
the lives of citizens. He has come out
against the spying of the NSA, wants to
reduce our military, desires to dismantle
the war on drugs, and pull back a lot of
the powers that the President has taken
for himself and give those powers back
to Congress. He ardently fights for the
right for Congress, rather than the President, to commit troops on the ground.
While his policy views will surely
help generate excitement in voters who
would typically not vote republican,
the use of technology could lead to
success in the polls as his social media
campaigning has surpassed any other
potential candidate. No other politician
uses social media as effectively as Rand
Paul. When a republican announces
their presidential candidacy, Rand Paul
advertisements show up when said republican is googled. For example, when
Jeb Bush announced in mid-December

that he was going to actively explore

running for president, Rand Paul paid
Google for ads that would pop up when
voters googled Jeb Bushs name. These
ads include statements such as Join a
movement working to shrink government. Not grow it We need leaders
to stand against common core. This
statement, popping up when someone
googled Jeb Bushs name, is a direct dig
at Jeb Bush as a conservative candidate
for supporting the expansion of government through common core. These
trolling moves re-direct voters attention
towards Paul and point out the contradictory stances his potential competitors
have as Republicans. The strategy is
also cost-efficient, because Google only
makes one pay for advertisements that
have been clicked on, and Paul will happily pay. While this method of trolling
is more subtle, Rand Paul also trolls in
much more direct ways. On Valentines
Day, Paul posted a picture (Figure 1) on
Pinterest in reaction to Hillarys recent
comments about being dead broke after Bill left office.
While critiques have said that this
type of behavior is unpresidential, one
must remember that it used to be unpresidential to even say you wanted to
be president. Andrew Jackson changed
all that; by being very vocal about desiring the presidency, and he eventually
attained the office. Slandering also used
to be un-presidential, but is now a given
in politics. While the discussion of the
morality of trolling in politics will be left
out of this article, I do believe the tactic
will be an effective way to get out blurbs
of information to voters about the competing candidates and a way to fire up
ones political base in a world where
branding and messaging is essential.
The road to winning the Republican primary, while a long shot, is in
the realm of possibilities. The current
front-runner (Jeb Bush) must seriously
falter enough to where the republican
field becomes more open. Candidates
such as Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee could split the evangelical/religious right faction vote. Ted Cruz voters
must come to the realization that he is
unelectable and switch to the candidate
that is second in passion for fighting Big
Government (Rand Paul). Most impor-

ISSUE I

tantly, Rand Paul must make the case

that he is the most electable candidate.
With Hillary Clinton most likely becoming the Democratic nominee, Rand
could effectively position himself in the
Republican primary as contrasting Hillary in significant ways (foreign policy,
government spending, etc.). Ideologically, Rand Paul and Hillary Clinton are
on the opposite ends of the spectrum
when it comes to determining the role
of government in American lives and
in peoples lives worldwide. In order to
win the Republican primary, Rand must
create a coalition of the minority fringe
sections of the Republican party (Evangelicals, Tea Partiers, Libertarians) in
order to battle the mainstream republicans who would never back Rand because his desire to reduce government
subsidies to Big Business and his anti-Wall Street mantra.
The controversial candidate has political stances that would seem to make
him a pariah for both parties, and even
politicians in general. Yet people in
America are desperate for a non-partisan answer. People try to paint Paul as a
libertarian, but that word is just a brand
that Paul will use to his advantage. A
Gallup governance survey found that
24% of the participants fell into the libertarian quadrant, and 44% of Americans accept the label of fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as
libertarian. It doesnt matter whether
Rand Paul is a libertarian, a conservative, or neither: people who identify as
libertarian or have libertarian views will
be drawn to Paul because his brand is
the only brand currently associated with
those ideas on a nation scale. While Paul
must be realpolitik when discussing social issues, as he still has to appeal to the
Republican base, he can mainstream
the Republican Party to potential voters
that would never have considered voting red. He is not a crazy Republican
who is trying to appeal to independents
by starting a movement that may lead
to the creation of a third party; he is a
rational, well thought out political mastermind who may have the right combination of policy views to get through
the Republican primary and challenge
any Democrat in the general election in
2016.

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ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

ISSUE I

25

The Politics of Morality

Where Do Democrats and Republicans Diverge?

ZACH DRAVIS
CONTRIBUTOR
There is an evolutionary basis for compassion and morality. Human brains are so
complex that after birth they continue to develop and increase to a size disproportionate
to their bodies. Because of this continued
growth, infants need such great care before
gaining the necessary skills to survive. Thus,
morality is evolutionarily valuablewe
have a mind for morality because those of
our ancestors that did were able to pass on
their genes. Although we are born with incredibly malleable minds, the idea that we
are born as blank slates is what Psychologist
Gary Marcus calls the most deceiving myth
about human nature. Socialization and our
formative years are revisions to an already
existing first draft of morality.
Jonathan Haidt and his team of moral
psychologists out of the University of Virginia surveyed cultures across the globe and
found 5 common moral foundations generally ubiquitous to all humankindthe
content of the first draft. With some degree
of variation, they are: 1) a withdrawal from
harm and a tendency towards care and compassion; 2) reciprocity, equality, and fairness;
3) in-group loyalty; 4) Authority and respect;
5) purity and sanctity.
Along with colleagues, Haidt has taken
data from over 30,000 people on measures
of these five moral categories. His results
when it comes to politics? Liberals tend
to place more value on the first two moral
foundations of compassion and equality.
Conservatives score higher on measures of
in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and
ideas of purity or sanctity. These are tendencies and preferencesnot ironclad rules
about one groups morality.
When we look, we can see these moral
dimensions play out in politics today. Liberals say to celebrate diversity (going against
ideas of in-group loyalty), to question authority (going against respect of authority), and to keep laws off of the body (going
against ideas of purity and sanctity). But
these moral divisions are not readily analyzed and instead of understanding the
moral foundation from which the other side
comes, the left and the right have both radically increased their vitriol toward one another. Do liberals seriously think that half

of the country voted for George Bush (twice)

because theyre idiots? I hope not and I certainly dont think so.
Consider the issue of torture, a generally divided issue along partisan lines. The
left often demonizes Vice President Dick
Cheney and other conservatives support
for torture. But Haidt explains that conservative leaders typically see themselves
as holding a responsibility to the people of
the United States, an in-group loyalty that
they have a duty to protect. Given moral dilemma problems, Conservatives score
higher on measures that indicate American
lives matter more than others and that they
would choose saving a smaller number of
American lives than a greater number of
lives of a different, unknown nationality.
So when we understand moral underpinnings, does it make us change our initial
beliefs? Of course not. I consider myself
staunchly liberal, yet seeing torture in this
light does not lead to a reversal of my position against. But what I can now understand is where those that disagree with me
are coming from. We can demonize one
another less, and I think that is valuable.
Take the invasion of Iraq. I think there
is popular sentiment among liberals that
the invasion would not have happened if
Al Gore had become president. There is a
school of thinkers in International Relations
known as neoconservatives. They generally
support democratization, unilateral action,
and preventive wars. Liberals often think
that the neoconservatives in charge during
the Bush years initiated the war because of
political biases, emotions, deceptions for the
sake of self-interests in making money from
oil, and over exaggerating the presence of
Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Here are some quotations from prominent neoconservatives. The National Security Strategy of the Bush administration said
that states in the Middle East, Continue to
threaten the sovereignty of their neighbors,
economic stability, and international access
to resourcesThe United States must lead
abroad if we are to be secure at home.
President Bush said, We have made it clear
that it is our policy to see Saddam Hussein
gone and if entrusted with the presidency,
my resolve will never waver. Further, Bush
said that, We know that he has stored away
secret supplies of biological weapons and

chemical weapons throughout his country

Iraq does pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf, and we should organize an international coalition to eliminate
his access to weapons of mass destruction.
Furthermore, Donald Rumsfield said
that, Iraq admitted, among other things,
an offensive biological warfare capability
And I might say inspectors believe that Iraq
has actually greatly understated its productioninspectors believe that Iraq actually
has greatly understated its production.
Colin Powell is quoted as saying, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance of the disarmament which was
demanded of it and which it needs to carry
out to win the confidence of the world and
to live in peace. He goes on to say that Iraq
has at least 1,000 tons of chemical agents to
be potentially put into bombs. And finally,
Vice President Dick Cheney has said, Even
today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed. Based
on highly credible intelligenceIraq probably retains several tons of the highly toxic
VX substance, as well as sarin nerve gas and
mustard gas.
These quotations were presented by International Relations scholar Frank Harvey.
He then turned the tables when, after reading the quotations, he revealed to his audience that in fact none of these quotes were
said by neither republicans, conservatives,
nor neoconservatives. Instead, the quotes
presented as being from the Bush administrations national security strategy are actually from the Clinton administrations strategy. The quotations attributed to President
Bush were actually said by Al Gore. Donald
Rumsfields line was actually Bill Clinton,
Colin Powells a prominent liberal thinker
Hans Blix, and Dick Cheneys quotations
was said by Scott Ritter, a strong liberal critic of the war.
This is a problem. An issue here is how
easy it is to demonize those that think differently from us. It blinds us to the true
complexity of political issues. At the rally to
restore sanity and/or fear Jon Stewart said:
When we amplify everything we hear nothing. Today, everything is amplified because
when it comes to morality, its very difficult
to accept that we might not be objectively
right. In todays politics we talk so much
and end up saying so little. We should remember to listen.

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

26

ISSUE I

ISSUE I

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

27

Education and Income Inequality

Whats Wrong and How Can We Fix It?
ANDY SAMANT
CONTRIBUTOR
The future lies in education. Im sure
that some good learning here and there
is great for democracy and maybe makes
people happier, but what Im saying is
much simpler. Its purely economic.
There is no abundance of low-skill
manufacturing jobs in this country today.
In the 21st century, those jobs have been
mechanized or outsourced. But there is an
abundance of untrained workers. So what
do we do now? How do we maximize the
potential for everyone? Even if you dont
get a bachelors degree, you should think
about specializing in something. This
seems like common sense, yet we treat
education as a hierarchy and a challenge.
Instead of helping everyone find an educational path that suits them, we make education a game of winners and losers.
So if large portions of the country
were left behind, what would we observe?
Logically, there should be a large class of
people incapable of finding jobs. Unfortunately, this is our reality. Long term unemployment--a six-week job search with
no results--is at an all-time high, declining
only when discouraged workers leave the
workforce altogether. Not everyone has felt
the recovery.
And who are these unfortunate souls?
Its disproportionately young people with,
at most, a high school diploma. Construction, manufacturing and transportation
(low-skill fields) have been hit the hardest
by far. These industries are not expected
to reach pre-recession employment levels
anytime soon. The only way to get a job in
these industries now is to be a technician
with the right skillset. These are mostly
tradesmen, like welders, electricians, and
machinists, who have completed apprenticeships. Some sort of training is becoming mandatory. Many of those without it
are becoming trapped in long-term unemployment. Here we see the so-called
skills-gap that many economists are buzzing about. If were looking for a structural
reason to explain unemployment and low
growth rates, this is starting to look like a
pretty good one.
We have a dire need for a more educated workforce. Price Waterhouse Coo-

per, a consulting agency, polled CEOs

from around the world and asked what
challenges they faced in the 21st century.
Most fear they cant attract skilled workers.
Studies from Manpower Group, a staffing
agency, reported that 52% of companies
are having trouble filling positions because
of a skills shortfall. These are far from the
only studies that show this phenomenon.
If conventional construction and manufacturing are on the decline, what are the
fastest growing job markets? Health professions, across the board, are providing
more jobs and larger wage increases than
anyone else. Software engineers and office
administrators are also seeing large gains.
However, hospitals cant just pick nurses
off the streets. People arent born knowing
how to write code. These jobs call for concrete skills.
How can education help this crowd?
Schooling is a notoriously long and expensive process. Can we guarantee that itll
be worth it in the end? The 2013 census
found that from a high school diploma to a
Ph.D, increasing educational attainment is
always correlated with a strong increase in
employment as well as earnings. Theres
no denying the return on college as an
investment. Bachelors, associates and
masters degrees all yield a 15% increased
return on average. Compare that the 5%
return that the stock market averages. The
expected annual income for bachelors
degree holders is over $75,000. For those

with only a high school diploma, average

income is $45,000. This is a divide that has
been increasing since at least the 1960s.
Education can be a ticket out of poverty. A Brookings Institute study examined
what happens when children born into the
lowest quintile attained degrees. Nearly
85% escaped the lowest income quintile;
19% even made it into the top quintile.
Compare this with those who did not
obtain a college degree: nearly half were
trapped at the bottom of the income ladder. Similar correlations can be seen across
all income levels.
So is it worth it to get a degree: yes,
now more than ever! Of course not everyone has to go to college, but there is certainly statistical backing to the claim that
higher education is a ticket to a middle
class life and even a track to the highest
income levels. So lets get serious about
education. Its good for individuals and its
good for the economy. Whats holding us
back?
Lets compare the experiences of children in the top 20% of income against
those in the bottom 20%. Even at an early age, money makes a difference. High
income families can afford time to spend
1,300 more hours educating their children
in out-of-home contexts before the age of
six, which is usually essential for developing reading skills by middle school. Essentially, Pre-K is a privilege for those who
can afford it. Some of you from richer cit-

c/o brookings.edu

ies might be familiar with the elite private

schools that take kids as early as pre-K. If
that seems crazy, it only illustrates how important it is to start education as early as
possible.
Between 1980 and 2009, as residential
segregation separated families by income,
public schools also became more segregated. Children in the poorer areas were
far more likely to attend classes with classmates that had behavioral problems and
in schools with decaying infrastructure.
In general, this makes for a worse educational experience and exhausts school resources. But dont let the kids take all the
blame. Lower income school districts can
have a tough time attracting quality teachers. A 2013 study found that most teachers
prefer to not teach in low-income schools.
The teachers in higher-income school districts generally have stronger academic
achievement, measured by having more
than a BA degree, the selectivity of their
undergraduate college, and their score on
the basic knowledge teacher-certification
exam. Naturally, the richer schools can
take their picks from the top of the talent
pool. If you think that the public schools
in the rich suburbs are equal to the poorer
inner city ones, youre kidding yourself.
Its not just schools. Outside of the
classroom, the divide between rich and
poor kids has been growing for decades.
One group gets tutors, private schooling,
music lessons, summer camps and anything else they might need to fill the gaps
of public education. Between 1972 and
2006, annual enrichment expenditures

rose for children of high income families

from $3,500 to $9,000. For children in low
income families, enrichment rose from
$850 to only $1,300. Those SAT-prep
classes arent cheap, but they sure can buff
up your college application.
The gap in SAT (and comparable test)
scores between the most affluent and the
least affluent students is estimated to have
grown by over 50% since 1960. The universities in America deemed most-selective are made up of 70% high-income students but only 5% of low-income students.
However, of those with no postsecondary
education, 40% come from a low-income
families while only 5% come from high-income families. The strongest predictors
of education attainment are family income and the education level of parents
(which often correlates closely with family
income). Its a vicious circle. High-income
kids receive expensive educations, which
lead to high incomes. If youre starting to
see a hierarchy, youre not alone. Were in
danger of regarding education as an aristocratic game of prestige and rank, rather
than the human right that it should be.
Early education has so failed our students that even getting to college is no
guarantee of success. More than a third
of college freshman take remedial courses
in basic English or Math. In some schools,
as much as 70% of freshman need these
courses. Students are paying college level
prices for high school level classes. This
process has been a major barrier for success in higher education. Why would you
pay extra, in time, effort and money, for

an education you should have received in

high school?
Education could be a wonderful way to
create a highly productive workforce and
lift the incomes of millions, but a not-solevel playing field has left many behind.
Education has created a caste system that
supposedly separates the smart from the
dumb, instead of trying to maximize the
potential of all students. If youre wondering why not all of us have the skills we
need, the answer starts here.
If theres a lesson in all this, its that
starting early makes a difference. It may
sound simple, but improving preschools
can go a long way in getting kids ready for
college from a young age. Many studies
have shown that preschool can have long
lasting effects on child development and
has immediate effects on test-taking abilities. President Obama has called for funding for a universal kindergarten program
multiple times. We hear it in every State of
the Union Address. Yet it never comes. If
we want equal education, lets try to provide an equal start.
If you look back at your K-12 experience, I bet that you can remember more
than a few teachers who didnt seem all
that qualified to teach. And I bet you can
also remember some amazing teachers
who made a huge difference for you but
get lumped in with the others. According
to top-performing countries such as South
Korea, Finland, and Singapore, quality of
teachers is linked to a schools success or
failure. All teachers in these countries must
come from at least the top third of their
c/o nytimes.com

28

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

classes and then are screened further for

quality assurance. Most have higher level
degrees and specialize in teaching. They
are then compensated very well, with paid
but rigorous training and high certification
benchmarks. In America, this is the equivalent of a $65,000 to $150,00 salary with
a performance bonus. Essentially, becoming a teacher is like becoming a doctor or
lawyer. In America, though, most teachers
come from the bottom third of college
graduates. Under a quarter--23%--of
teachers come from the top third of their
classes. That number is 14% if you only
look at high poverty schools. Additionally, American schools are having trouble
attracting teachers in science and math
related fields.
Why is this? Its all about salary! Many
go into teaching for the voluntary good
of it and because it is fulfilling. However,
the starting salary for teachers in America is about $39,000 and averages at about
$54,000. If you remember from earlier, this
is well below what most college graduates
earn. Forget further training. Why bother
going to college?! Sure, some teachers do it
purely because its a career that suits them,
but you cant deny that there is absolutely
no financial incentive for talented college
graduates to think about teaching. Especially when they could make double or triple that in law or medicine. So why cant
we offer competitive salaries? It would be
expensivereally expensive. The estimated cost is about $10-30 million per district.
but thats actually pretty reasonable if you
consider the quality of school we could
achieve.
While blindly throwing money at the
problem wont fix anything, taking money
out of the system isnt really going to help
either. Without money, schools usually
cut the most expensive programs, though
these are often the most relevant programs. A community college nursing program in North Carolina has a waiting list
to get on its waiting list, despite the states
severe shortage of nurses. This is the result
of a state budget that has been slashing
educational spending for decades. Its not
the only one. State colleges from Michigan
to Nebraska have all completely cut entire
engineering and computer science departments due to lack of funding. Yet these are
exactly the areas that we should be focusing on. State funding for colleges has been
falling in recent years, despite growing demand for higher education. This has led
to a near doubling of state school tuitions
since 1985. Restoring affordability and re-

ISSUE I

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

ISSUE I

29

On Fossil Fuel Divestment

MELISSA LOWE
CONTRIBUTOR

versing this trend should be a priority for

our generation (a battle we would have to
fight at the state and local level).
The federal government should assist
low-income families in paying for college.
Federal merit-based scholarships and tuition assistance grants can provide, and
therefore cost the government, as much
as $28,000 per student. Sounds like a lot
of money, but remember that big boost
in income you get from getting just a little
college education. This investment could
pay for itself very quickly. Its a wonder we
arent spending more in these areas. Some
less conventional but cost effective methods are also being investigated. Providing
college mentors and merely simplifying
the financial aid process can increase enrollment for a relatively cheap cost.
If were looking for immediate vocational training programs, the federal government might be the best place to start.
Often times, the government finances
alternatives to traditional college or university degrees. The federal government
currently gives $2 billion in Pell Grants
to struggling community colleges for job
training. Some have proposed raising this
amount to $10 billion, but as with most
budget proposals, it never got an honest
debate. Last May, Congress did bring back
a program that hasnt been funded since
2003, The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. This act currently provides
over a million untrained workers with an
account to spend at certified educational institutions, like vocational schools or
community colleges. The best part is that it

only costs $3,000 to $5,000 per worker and

takes less than a year. Salary and employment increases usually follow. Its an effective program. So whats holding it back?
Again, its a matter of funding. A lack of
funding has shut some program centers
down completely. The program lacks key
resources, such as counselors to help enrollees plan their training, and practicable
transportation. These services are crucial
to getting enrollees to finish their training,
let alone begin it. Essentially, we have a
stigma against educating adults. Whats
wrong with adults going back to school? If
you decide to get educated past a certain
age, it is difficult. Considering how crucial education has become to our economy and to individuals, this stigma doesnt
make any sense.
Thus we have an attitude problem. We
live in a culture where getting an A is better than knowing a skill. We act like public
education provides an equal footing when
we know it doesnt. Were scared of making any real investments in education because it might raise taxes. We judge those
who dont make it through college. We tell
them that theyre dumb.
The system needs to change. This
means looking for solutions at all levels of
government. It means finding extra money in state budgets. It means rethinking
curricula. It means getting adults back to
school. Regardless of how we fix inequality in education, we must raise awareness
about it. Its not a matter of choice or preference. Its a human right and an economic imperative.
c/o kgou.org

Fossil fuel divestment has been a major issue

on college campuses--including Wesleyans--for
the past few years, and for a movement with
fairly strong campus support at numerous institutions, divestment initiatives have been
surprisingly unsuccessful. According to GoFossilFree.org, part of a greater network of
groups campaigning to ameliorate climate-related issues, only 26 universities or university
systems have committed to divestment. The
largest and perhaps most influential of these
is Stanford, but even Stanford has only committed to divesting from 100 coal companies in
their direct investments. Other universities with
larger student populations and endowments
have tended to refuse divestment petitions.
In many ways, this is a surprising contradiction. Many of us sit in our science, government, and economics classes and learn about
the current and potential impacts of climate
change. There is widespread consensus that
climate change has been caused by an increase in greenhouse gases produced by human activity. In theory, we can only mitigate
this effect by minimizing our current production of greenhouse gases. So why not divest
from companies that earn billions of dollars
in mining, refining, and selling the fossil fuels
widely blamed for greenhouse gas emissions?
Universities would be much more prone to
divest if not for the financial consequences that
it involves. Wesleyan has been working very
hard on building its endowment for the past
five years or so, which is why we rarely see President Roth--hes off campaigning for increased
endowment. These actions are extremely
important for increasing financial aid, developing and maintaining academic programs,
and creating new university spaces. Our endowment has grown from $601.5 million in
2011to $793.3 million at the end of the year
2014. Maintaining this growth is presumably
the main focus of the Investment Committee.
Our WesDivest group has stated that withdrawing investment in fossil fuels from the 15
worst companies incurs virtually no risk penalty. This may be true for direct investments,
however the risk involved for Wesleyan changes
substantially due to the way our investments
are presumably organized. The Investment
Committee may choose specific areas of investment for some of the funds, but ultimately most of our investment goes to global and
private equities and hedge funds. This means

that to maintain our endowment growth, we

choose other groups to make investments
for us. These investments are typically called
commingled funds. To divest from fossil fuels,
we would probably have to leave these larger
firms and this action may decrease the returns
of investments and growth of endowment.
You could, of course, argue that staying on
higher moral ground may be worth the loss in
investment and that perhaps Wesleyans movement away from these problematic companies
would influence the commingled fund groups
to invest in companies with more environmentally sustainable policies. In many ways, this is
true, but it misses the bigger issue and the reason why people, companies, and nations continue to invest in fossil fuel industries. We need
energy. The modern world runs on access to
electricity and fuel for transportation. And the
market for energy isnt going away. Its growing
along with population and globalization. The
most classist and racist issue that societies face
today is access to energy. Energy means security--access to clean water, healthcare, education, and also financial and political stability.
Yes, climate change is a severe problem.
The scientific evidence is piling up that changes in the levels of CO2 and other greenhouse
gases will cause a substantial and irreversible
increase in global temperatures for at least
hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It has the
potential to change weather patterns, increase
sea levels, acidify the oceans and cause mass
extinctions. Longer and more severe droughts
will exacerbate famines and water shortages.
Weather-related events have become increasingly intense. Wildfires will become more costly
and harder to control. De-vegetation destroys
soils and increases erosion rates impacting
farming communities and food sources. People
are not wrong to call this the greatest problem
humanity has ever faced. As campus divestment groups have pointed out, these events
have inordinately greater impacts on impoverished communities. But what if these communities were less impoverished? Thats what
economic growth brings. Thats what the use
of cheap and dirty fuels helps achieve even
with their degradation of human and environmental health. Energy and economic security allow people to adapt to climatic changes.
In the US, environmentalist groups can easily forget the reasons that have driven the development of such massive energy industries. We
have power most of the time. We have access to
transportation. Our hold on political power is
not tenuous, nor in the hands of warlords. Chil-

dren have light by which to do homework. We

dont spend our time doing hard backbreaking
labor due to automation. There are very few
people in the US who have to think carefully
about the amount of fuel they use to boil a pot
of water. In contrast, according to the UN and
International Energy Agency, in 2010 there
were an estimated 1.4 billion people did not
have access to energy. Heres another statistic:
there are 741 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa who currently use the same amount of energy as the 19.5 million people in New York. In
other words, New York uses almost 40 times the
amount of energy as all of Sub-Saharan Africa.
People in developing countries want to rise
to our level of consumption. We, in many ways,
are the epitome of success. Mass media, culture, and globalization have made this into the
ideal. To say to developing nations, Use solar
panels, or You cant drive gas-powered cars,
denies them the opportunity to aspire to this
ideal without giving them the choice to do so.
So my question is, can we, in the name
of climate change and ensuring our planets
health for future generations, deny the poor
and disenfranchised people access to the same
levels of energy use, material wealth, and stability that we enjoy today in the United States?
This is what we face when we say no to fossil
fuels. Its not that I dont want divestment. Its
not that I dont believe in climate change. Its
not that Im unaware of the issues relating to
fossil fuel usage. I recognize that fracking, mining, refining, and combusting fossil fuels is dangerous, unsustainable, and terrible for the environment. But I also know that there is a serious
need and demand for energy on this planet.
We have a burgeoning population and a fundamental respect for human life and self-determination. Were also incredibly selfish. We dont
want our quality of life to diminish in any way.
The reality is, fossil fuels still get the most
bang for your buck. Renewables are becoming cheaper, but even in first world nations,
our energy grid systems are still based on fossil fuels. The truth remains that, for the time
being, renewable energies are not the immediately easy, financially viable option for large
companies to invest in. These large companies
are the ones that drive consumption and are
the face of progress in developing countries. I
dont mean to say that this is right or the way
it should be, but it is what exists currently. The
question then becomes, which do we value
more: bringing a minimum humane standard
of living to every human being today, or divesting from fossil fuels for a better tomorrow?

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

30

ISSUE I

In Defense of the Constitutionality

of Gay Marriage
AARON STAGOFF-BELFORT
STAFF
June is the pivotal month for Supreme
Court decisions. The final day of each term
is particularly crucial because it is often the
occasion when the Court decides to issue
rulings on its most controversial and noteworthy cases. While proceedings centering
on issues of freedom of speech and discrimination against Muslims will dominate the
attention of the Court and the general public
for the months ahead, the Supreme Court
has not yet granted certiorari on the most
contentious suit it will likely tackle this summer: the constitutionality of gay marriage.
When the Supreme Court grants certiorari, this means it issues a directive to an inferior court to send a case up to the Supreme
Court for review. The Supreme Court is likely to grant certiorari on a case if it satisfies at
least one of three criteria. First, the Supreme
Court will grant cert when a lower court, particularly a state court, issues rulings that contradict federal laws. Second, in particularly
complex cases, various federal or state courts
will often reach contradictory rulings on the
same issue and the Supreme Court will grant
certiorari to establish a uniform precedent.
Finally, in cases that have potentially broad
implications on the lives of many Americans,
the Supreme Court often reviews these cases to reinforce or establish new precedents.
Gay marriage is likely to appear on the
Supreme Courts docket this summer because of the Courts compelling interest
to resolve two of these conflicts that have
emerged. The recent disagreement over gay
marriage between the Federal District Court
and Supreme Court of Alabama, as well as
petitions filed challenging the constitutionality of these laws in Kentucky, Michigan,
Ohio, and Tennessee demonstrate that no
clear consensus has emerged among district
or state courts concerning gay marriage. In
addition, while in 2008 only 2 states recognized marriage equality, 37 states have
now recognized gay marriage either by
court decision or through legislative efforts.
The question of whether gay marriage is
constitutional rests in an argument over the
application of the 10th and 14th Amendments in regards to members of the gay

community. The 14th Amendment reads:

No State shall make or enforce any law
which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall
any State deprive any person of life, liberty,
or property, without due process of law; nor
deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws. Assuming both
partners in a union are citizens of the U.S.,
they should expect to enjoy equal rights and
due process of law delegated to them by the
Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses
of the 14th Amendment. Restrictions on gay

marriage do not only limit individuals freedom and abridge the privileges of citizens,
they also bar gay couples from receiving
many of the government benefits that married people receive (this includes tax breaks,
the right to receive Social Security and
Medicare for spouses and visitation rights
in health care and burial, among others).
Essentially, in regards to the 14th Amendment, challengers of gay marriage do not
have a strong argument to counteract the
Equal Protection Clause. In previous decades, public opinion and policy had been
vastly more conservative when analyzing
the moral implications of gay marriage.
Thus, detractors of gay marriage attempted

to invalidate homosexuals 14th Amendment

rights by claiming that gays should not necessarily enjoy these rights at all. However, in
the past twelve years or so, the tide of support has shifted in favor of gay marriage.
A blatantly ignorant and reproachful plea
to morals by conservative members of the
Court, like Associate Justice Antonin Scalias
dissent in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), will no
longer hold weight: Todays opinion is the
product of a Court, which is the product of a
law-profession culture, that has largely signed
on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by

which I mean the agenda promoted by some

homosexual activists directed at eliminating
the moral opprobrium that has traditionally
attached to homosexual conduct. However,
in 2015 we live in a society where the majority of states have legalized gay marriage,
and Gallup and ABC News public opinion
polls show nearly 60% of Americans approve of gay marriage. Justice Scalia can no
longer claim that support for gay marriage
is merely a product of an isolated minority
of liberal justices, lawyers and advocates.
In regards to the 10th Amendment, a constitutional defense of gay marriage becomes
trickier. Since the Constitution mentions
nothing explicit about whether federal or
c/o time.com

ISSUE I

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

state governments should manage marriage

laws, the 10th Amendment delegates that:
The powers not delegated to the United
States by the Constitution, nor prohibited
by it to the States, are reserved to the States
respectively, or to the people. States have
traditionally determined marriage laws,
and for years public opinion more or less
mirrored these decisions. However, in an
age when the public has shifted towards an
endorsement of gay marriage, who has the
authority to resolve gay marriage laws? In
addition, can a state law be constitutional if
it so transparently violates the 14th Amendment? For further debate, we must defer to
Court precedent, referred to as stare decisis.
Since the Warren Courts landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Supreme Court has sporadically taken steps to expand Equal Protection
rights. In 1966, the Virginia Supreme Court
in Loving v. Commonwealth (1966) upheld
the states ban on interracial marriage. The
Virginia Courts reasoning in Loving, which
was built on the 10th Amendments distinction between federal and state powers, follows
a similar argument advanced by proponents
of gay marriage bans: Marriage has traditionally been subject to state regulation, without federal intervention, and, consequently,
the regulation of marriage should be left to
exclusive control by the 10th Amendment.
In Loving, the Virginia Supreme Court avoided a 14th Amendment challenge by claiming
that the federal government did not have jurisdiction in deciding who could get married.
However, in 1967, the U.S. Supreme
Court granted cert on the newly titled Loving
v. Virginia (1967), and struck down the Virginia ban. The Court effectively ended racebased legal restrictions on marriage on the
logic that the ban infringed upon the Equal
Protection and Due Process clauses of the
14th Amendment. Writing for a unanimous
majority, Chief Justice Earl Warren invoked
a passionate defense of equal rights that
drew parallels to his famed Brown decision:
Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of
man, fundamental to our very existence and
survival There is patently no legitimate
overriding purpose independent of invidious
racial discrimination that justifies this classification. The 14th Amendment requires that
the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations.
Speaking on behalf of the entire court, Warren dismantled the notion that interracial
couples were somehow exceptions to the
Equal Protection Clause because they could
not have productive or moral relationships.
For the purpose of building a constitution-

al defense of interracial marriage, Associate

Justice Potter Stewarts more obscure, but
almost equally as salient, concurring opinion
defines the problematic aspects of justifying
interracial marriage bans through the 10th
Amendment: It is simply not possible for
a state law to be valid under our Constitution which makes the criminality of an act
depend upon the race of the actor. Chief
Justice Warren briefly echoed Stewarts short
concurrence in his majority opinion: Under
our Constitution the freedom to marry, or not
marry, a person of another race resides with
the individual, and cannot be infringed by
the State. So, in cases concerning the equal
application of marriage laws via the 14th and
10th Amendment, the question is, can sexual
preference be substituted for race? A 2013 U.S.
Supreme Court decision titled United States
v. Windsor (2013) used Loving to do just that.

The change in peoples attitudes on that issue has been enormous. In recent years, people
have said, This is the way I am. And others looked around, and we discovered its our
next-door neighbor -- were very fond of them.
Or its our childs best friend, or even our
child. I think that as more and more people
came out and said that this is who I am, the
rest of us recognized that they are one of us.
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice
of the Supreme Court
United States v. Windsor is the latest domino to fall in the Courts progressive redefinition of marriage rights. Edith Windsor and
Thea Spyer, a same-sex couple living in New
York, were married in Ontario, Canada in
2007. After Spyer died in 2009, she left her
estate to Windsor, who tried to claim federal estate tax exemptions but was barred by
Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA), which narrowly defines marriage
as being between a man and a woman. As a
result, she was forced to pay $363,053 by the
IRS in estate taxes. After both the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New
York and the U.S. Second Circuit Court of
Appeals unanimously affirmed that DOMA
was unconstitutional because it violated the
Due Process Clause of the 5th Amendment,
the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme
Court, which quickly granted cert on the case.

In a 5-4 ruling in favor of Windsor, the majority declared unconstitutional
DOMAs exclusion of gay couples from re-

31

ceiving federal estate tax exemptions. While

the Courts ruling, authored by the conservative-leaning swing-justice Anthony Kennedy, was somewhat cumbersome and failed
to make completely clear whether the law
was being declared unconstitutional because
it violated the 5th Amendment, the 14th
Amendment, or both, the decision echoed
elements of Loving: DOMAs principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned
marriages and make them unequal. The
principal purpose is to impose inequality,
not for other reasons like governmental efficiency.The federal statute is invalid, for
no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure
those whom the State, by its marriage laws,
sought to protect in personhood and dignity. In Windsor, just as Warren had done in
Loving, Kennedy identified a compelling interest in the recognition of marriage equality, and recognized that these bans have little
governmental purpose besides encouraging
inequality. Moreover, Kennedy cited Loving
as precedent and justification for his decision that restrictions on same-sex marriage
are unconstitutional: State laws defining
and regulating marriage, of course, must respect the constitutional rights of persons, see,
e.g., Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1 (1967).
While the decision in Windsor was not so
broad that it effectively legalized all gay marriage, it represents Loving come full circle
and establishes the precedent necessary to
overturn gay marriage bans once and for all.
It seems the Court can read the writing
on the wall as well. In his fiery dissent in
Windsor, Justice Scalia recognized that gay
marriage bans are likely to be dissolved in
the future: As far as this Court is concerned,
no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of
listening and waiting for the other shoe. By
formally declaring anyone opposed to samesex marriage an enemy of human decency,
the majority arms well every challenger to a
state law restricting marriage to its traditional
definition. Given the expansive evolution of
the Courts interpretation of marriage over
the past forty years beginning with Loving,
and several key decisions in the past two
decades, including Lawrence v. Texas and
United States v. Windsor that have expanded
gay rights, it seems the Court is finally ready
to declare gay marriage bans a violation of
the Constitution. Justice Ginsburgs comments in February only reinforce both the
Court and the publics progressive growth
in regards to gay marriage: that it is normal,
that it is moral, and, most importantly, that
it is fundamentally wrong and unconstitutional to deny gay people the right to marry.

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

32

ISSUE I

68 Revisited

Or Against Repressive Desublimation

MARK ODELTNOV
CONTRIBUTOR
The predicament of our time is very well
traced to the moment of a sort of mans
anxious outcry in demand for the real thing:
individual understanding, loyal recognition, and love. John Lennon captured the
essence of it in his words: Reality leaves a
lot to the imagination. How much do we
still have our imagination with us, you ask
me? Verified by the Congress, signed by the
President, and sustained by the contract killers we have our dreams affirmed, adopted
and enforced. On this city upon a hill, the
white male human animal pills the blood
of others abundantly and gratifies the eyes
of his evil gods, and though he is long ago
dead, he pretends to be. Where do we come
from? What are we? Where are we going?
Although what was true and real in the
hippie culture is now unrecoverable, the
deeds and dreams of our parents continue
to live in modern neoliberal ideology. The
state apparatus captured the mood of youth
rebellion and exploited it. What is left now
of the past is sterilized and castrated, deprived of any political momentum. Various
mutations of New Left, such as queer theory, post-colonialism, multiculturalism, are
now weapons of oppression in the hands
of political engineers. We are ensured that
progress belongs to the domain of economy and is therefore accomplished by large
corporations primary economic agents
that organize and produce. The political
machine in the late capitalism, logically following the premise of its existence (existing
to guarantee and provide the benefit for society), merges in its activity with the interests
of large corporations and acts to diplomatically establish and regulate the emergence
of new markets across the globe. Hence, the
emphasis on development and support of
the middle class an undetermined and
amorphous social group one can relate to
that is supposed to be a beneficiary in-itself
via an increase in consumption. Likewise,
progressive social change, now publicly encouraged, has devolved to a matter of legislature imaginarily benefiting a perpetually
fragmented and invented race of really
oppressed (gays, lesbians, etc.), even when
this legislature is popularly resisted (as it was
with the French anti-gay-marriage march).

In this whole picture, the role of an individual in the progress is reserved to a dimension of insignificant commoditized social
exchange. One is endowed with the responsibility to carry out cultural innovation. That
is, to learn to live better with other individuals in conditions of market competition (estrangement and exploitation) to survive
artistically, in other words. The purpose of
this essay is to show how senseless is cultural
innovation devoid of any particularist and
articulated political and economic claims
and to argue for a shift in tactics. I will attempt to discern characteristic traits of the
counterculture with concluding remarks as
to the relevance of the past and prospective
for the future. In doing so I will rely most
heavily on an eclectic cultural and intellectual analysis with an emphasis on the
make-up of the hippies sense of the self.

Since the world is on a delusional course,

we must adopt a delusional standpoint towards the world.
-J. Baudrillard

The Hippie era was first and foremost a

time when people came together to protest
against utter destructiveness and wasteful
use of the accumulated social wealth by the
capitalist regime. The movement incorporated social and political activism of people
across different cultures, economic classes
and professional occupations. In America,
the motive force of the upheaval consisted of young middle bourgeois students.
Their reaction was prepared by the developments in pharmaceutical industry; the
draft system; close encounters with the blatant cruelty, injustice, and inequality; stagnation of mainstream culture; influence of
Marxist literature and particularly Herbert
Marcuses work; and, among others, anti-intellectualism. To understand what students
marched against, let us refer to a couple of
concrete historical examples that hopefully
will illuminate the nature of their protest.
We will limit ourselves to the problems of
culture, Marxism and anti-intellectualism.
In 1962, the world saw Andy Warhols
Campbells Soup Cans. Warhol first produced it as a collection of 32 prints, corresponding to 32 varieties of the canned
soup the company offered at the time. Before, the artist worked in a non-painterly

semi-cartoonist genre and wished to discover a new pop art subject to avoid competition with the more finished style of
comics by Roy Lichtenstein. He said: Ive
got to do something that really will have a
lot of impact that will be very personal,
that wont look like Im doing exactly what
theyre doing. Just what exactly makes
these words of Warhol sound sarcastic?
Pop art was the product of bourgeoning
post-war capitalism, for it, even more than
abstract expressionism, could survive only
in the environment of elegant museums, depended on prestigious critical literature, and
connected closely to the market. However,
pop art was first to do away with the art
component. Like the abstract expressionists after Pollock, Warhol never touched the
brush and too never looked for an exalted
subject matter for his paintings. He wished
to express himself, but in doing so to leave
no trace whatsoever of the common among
the other male artists macho attitude in
painting. Warhols greatest invention was
the process. He pared his image vocabulary
down to the icon itselfto brand names,
celebrities, dollar signsand removed all
traces of the artists hand in the production of his paintings. His deadpan manner
endeavored to be devoid of emotional and
social commentary. Unlike Monets studies
of water lilies that were meant to glorify the
eyes natural power to perceive one and the
same object differently, the Campbells Cans
was the ultimate proclamation of the mans
capacity to clone sameness within a glut.
Warhol acted as an industrialist, who organizes the production process and supplies a
line of objective representations of a canonical plot. Medieval artists left to us countless paraphrases of the Biblical narratives,
while Andy Warhol effectively retold how
Marilyn Monroes smile appeared on the
TV screen to my eyes, charming as always.
After Warhol, institutional art came to
demise. It could no longer support pop arts
pretense for seriousness. In the end of the
day, in the words of the first painter of pop
art and its critic, Richard Hamilton: The
only difference between popular art and
pop art is that pop art is sophisticated; its
not done by masses, but its done by highly professionally trained experts for mass
audience. That Warhol wanted to be personal in his work sounds sarcastic because,

ISSUE I

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

intended or not, he ended up producing

an honest depiction of the radical artifice
of mass culture. Taking great pains to endorse the splendor of modernity and wishing to express a positive view of modern
culture, Warhol demonstrated that it is only
possible to do so through abandoning any
natural, human expressivity. To sincerely
speak about the popular object, the human
subject itself must disappear. The story goes
that Bob Dylan addressed the illustrator
in Like a Rolling Stone, Hes not selling
any alibis as you stare into the vacuum of
his eyes. With his artistic impasse, Warhol invented the crystallized personality of
a consumer. He, as a personification of an
individual trapped in autonomous obscurity, set an impulse for the counterculture
to embrace and exalt the virtues of compassion, awareness, and experimentation.
The horizon of new possibilities was
best visible at the time to a privileged class
of young bourgeois college students. Unlike the proletariat, the bourgeoisie does not
produce. Sartre comments on this division
<> [The bourgeoisie] directs, administers, distributes, buys, sells. His activity is
based on a constant commerce with men
While he does not enter into material (laborious) relations with things and therefore
does not envisage the social world in the
same way as the material world, he nevertheless can, when class conscious, act in the
role of coordinator of relations of social association. That is, in the absence of a proper
proletarian leadership, instead of the installation of real economic equality (abolition of
private property and exploitation, etc.), he is
occupied with demanding social justice (laws
to guarantee universal equality of the conditions of competition). A new society here is
born via redistribution of individual rather
than institutional power relations. The whole
process, therefore, in the immediate future
is accompanied by cultural transformation
of superstructure of the society rather than
its base. Let us discover who contributed to
and shaped the social struggle of the time.
This new world of baby-boomers, who
were existentially threatened by a prospect
of dying in Vietnam, in their philosophy of
anti-establishment and self-inflicted marginality built upon the foundation of the
Beat Generation, a rebellious group of
non-conformists disillusioned by the realities
of a more perfect union. The most prominent representative of the generation was
undoubtedly Jack Kerouac. While serving in
the US Navy in 1943, he arrived on the sick
list after eight days of active duty. He went
to get aspirin. Two days later he was dis-

charged on psychiatric grounds. The medical examiners report said that he was of indifferent character and quoted Kerouacs
explanation: I just cant stand it; I like to be
by myself. He was diagnosed as a schizoid
personality. Kerouac strongly resisted the
authoritarian environment of the Army, and
at home was disaffected by the meek and instrumental quality of human relations, so
much in contrast to candid and emotional
attachment he had to his mother, with whom
he never parted and who eventually outlived
the writer. Since the world was empty for
him, Kerouac was trying to invent a new one
where he would feel comfortable. He was
not much successful in this. He died of alcoholism and in his final appearance on TV
did not make an impression of a man who
could articulate himself. Kerouac was very
much alone in his fight. Many were inspired
by his devotion to find happiness that is not
immediately ready-to-hand and that cannot be automatically manufactured, bought
or gifted. However, unlike beats, hippies
were willing to act on the world from their
outside, be in the world, and transform
Kerouacs anxious infantilism into a politically and deliberately franchised perversity.
Another influence came from the Europe. Besides the wise voices of civil rights
activists, such as Martin Luther King Jr.
and John Lewis, and their militant ideological counterparts headed by Malcolm X
and Huey P. Newton, there was in the hippie era a potent Marxist current. It came
originally from the Frankfurt School critics
works of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, who took up and developed Sigmund
Freuds argument found in Civilization and
its Discontents against civilization as inhib-

33

iting sexual drives and prohibiting pleasure,

producing in the end an ill society. With the
rise of Nazism and Stalinism, many were
surprised to see that the proletariat was willingly embracing the oppression and excessively falling into bad consciousness. That is,
it was working on its own oppression. Reich
argued in The Mass Psychology of Fascism
that the proletariat acted against its interests
because it was deprived of orgastic potency
(in brief, the ability to love and enjoy), and
hence revolutionary potential, discretely and
individually at the early stages of human
child development in a proletariat family:
Suppression of the natural sexuality in
the child, particularly of its genital sexuality,
makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted
in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the
rebellious forces because any rebellion is
laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in
the child, a general inhibition of thinking
and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal
of sexual suppression is that of producing
an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to
it in spite of all misery and degradation.
Interestingly, Reich believed that the
swastika was widely adopted by Nazis for
its resemblance of a primal scene (when a
child discovers that his parents have sexual
relationships). Marcuse too believed that
reducing sexual restrictions would release
energies that would make possible increased
happiness, culture, and creative work. However, he opposed Reichs emphasis on genital
sexuality and orgasm as the only form of
enjoyment. He complained: Sexual liberation per se becomes for Reich panacea for
c/o christies.com

34

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

individual and social ill. Against Reich, he

argued that in a non-repressive civilization
sexuality would take other forms besides
sexual intercourse. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse differentiated between basic
and surplus sexual suppression and believed
that non-repressive sublimation of sexual
instincts can eroticize ones social and work
relations and that socialist state could replace alienated labor with non-alienated
libidinal work and free creative impulses.
For those born after World War II, the
emergence of television as a source of entertainment and information as well as
the associated massive expansion of consumerism afforded by post-war affluence
and encouraged by TV advertising was
a key component in youthful disillusionment
and the formulation of new social behaviors, even as ad agencies heavily courted
the hip youth market. A rapid growth in
the production scale coupled with an increase in private sector consumption left
unattended, however, the public sector.
Baby-boomers grew in the world uniformly wrapped by the informational field, but
upon departing from the household and
becoming independent consumers, they
discovered that there was no market at the
time to serve the needs of de-privatized
recreational hedonism. Paired with the appearance of political activism articulated
by the contributors of beat-generation and
Marxism, it prepared an environment for
the rejection of economic materialism as
such and ideological transition of behavior
that Timothy Leary famously conceived
as, Turn on, tune in, drop out. Drop out
of restraints totally, If it feels good, do it!
Here, we are ready to discuss the last trait
of the counterculture: anti-intellectualism.
The college students that were involved
in the protest movement of the 60s and early
70s believed that they were totally informed
on the existential conditions of the human being and what stood as an obstacle on the way
to feeling happy. Ultimately, they fell into old
Manichean dualism that viewed the world as
a constant struggle between the principles of
evil and good. The former at the time was
taken to be represented by stubbornness, obtuseness, and ignorance. The world, in the
eyes of hippies, unreasonably refused to confess what it desires to love and be happy.
By anti-intellectualism, then, I mean a
particular behavior of the activists that they
choose to overcome the forces of the old
and evil. For example, in the interview with
Bryan Magee on BBC later in the 80s, Herbert Marcuse was quick to praise the students that they did not need a father figure

to lead them to protest against the society

which revealed daily its destructiveness.
However, together with his colleagues critical of the tactics of emancipatory struggle
led by the students, Herbert Marcuse pointed out that they falsely prescribed a revolutionary character to the non-revolutionary
conditions of the time in the US and chose
non-revolutionary means in the allegedly
revolutionary struggle. He thought that the
reasons for this were that the student movement was isolated from the working class
and discouraged by the apparent impossibility of any spectacular political action.
Inspired by the sophisticated belief that the
society unnecessarily repressed sexuality and
creativity, diminishing the humans individuality to that of one-dimensional man
(another of Marcuses terms), the protesters
wanted to overcome and to cancel out the
suppression by individual liberation from
the system, embracing the power of love
that Jimi Hendrix put in sharp contrast to
the love of power. The counterculture
viewed the road to peace, happiness, and
civilization to lie in the throwing away of authoritatively inflicted hate and contempt for
each other and mutual embracing of the differences on a basis of the power to love each
other (indiscriminating genital sexuality). We
find this philosophy accurately expressed,
for example, in the lyrics of The Beatles
(Back in the USSR: Well the Ukraine girls
really knock me out/ And Moscow girls
make me sing and shout) and Bob Dylan
(Mozambique: Theres a lot of pretty girls
in Mozambique/ And plenty time for good
romance). Hunter Thompson too in his famous wave speech from Fear and Loathing expressed the sentiment of the era:

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind.

Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in
mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in,
freakout, get beaten.
-Hunter S. Thompson
There was a fantastic universal sense
that whatever we were doing was right, that
we were winning And that, I think, was
the handlethat sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in
any mean or military sense; we didnt need
that. Our energy would simply prevail
We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.
So now you can go up on a steep
hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with
the right kind of eyes you can almost see

ISSUE I

the high-water mark that place where

the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Thompsons Las Vegas is a mutation of the
American dream, where the depth of experience is replaced with intensity and where
the promise of a better life for everybody
became reified in a check for 15 minutes
of fame, signed over to a housewife, a
policeman, a clerk, a bus driver, a waitress
virtually anybody, except the man himself. Reporting on the carnival madness at
The Circus-Circus he went through under
the affect of ether, Thompson wrote: [It]
is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won
the war. This is the sixth Reich. Indeed, it
is a carrousel one gets to choose to ride on
for some time for a reasonable price. Las
Vegas is a declaration of the victory of the
one-dimensional man, who appears there to
enjoy how he wants. In my work I attempted to problematize the question of wants,
the he who wants, and argue what led the
hippies to believe that they knew their wants
better. I hope I have convinced the reader
that the sexual revolution has largely shaped
the society we live in today and that one can
hear in the present voice of the new normal
echo of the past scandal. Let me summarize the relation between consumption and
the counterculture and draw a conclusion.
The second half of the twentieth century saw a great confrontation in the western
hemisphere between the pressure of what
was left of the old civilization and the emergence the new. In spite of the revolutionary
claims and relative marginality, the counterculture of the 60s in America was largely
a product of the trend of rapid capital accumulation. In words of Ernest Mandel, a
great Marxist theoretician of late capitalism,
Expansion under capitalism is accompanied by overcapitalization (difficulties of valorization of capital), growing difficulties of
realization, increasing wastage of material
values and growing alienation and deformation of workers in their productive activity and sphere of consumption. Hence,
consumerism, a negatively conceived rise in
consumption, that, although partially enforced on men out of a need to realize capital and account for the increase in the sales
costs of products, as such contains a prerequisite of rich individuality. This genuine
extension of needs is a corollary of the necessary civilizing function of capital. That is
why the growth of needs can be traced back
to positive quantitative and qualitative transformations in time and form of recreation.
For it is a creation of surplus space for consumption. However, the more the actual

ISSUE I

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

consumption of goods is satiated Mandel points out the more its quantitative
extension become irrational and degenerates into disgust with life. The counterculture escaped the aristocratic decadence of
the beat generation (a narrow rejection of
consumerism blind to its civilizing influence)
and actualized the gap in the markets cover of de-privatized recreational needs that
existed at the time. In other words, hippies
created a system of social exchange devoid
of profit motive, developed a rational
consumption, consciously controlled and
consciously subordinated to their collective
interests. Without capitals authorization, it
went beyond the possible towards the imaginable and there envisaged a civilization of
non-commodified, non-repressive culture
at the same time when the others were
deeply rooted in capitals here and now.
One can say that Las Vegas vacationists
betrayed the rise of a new civilization by
choosing to seek pleasure in obedience to
the law of the father figure (the state, the
religion, etc.), while the young were willing
to altogether abandon the repressive commandments of the father and figure out a
new lifestyle. However, the latter were unrealistic in their political plans. They generalized a particular non-revolutionary situation
and chose ineffective means to achieve the
political ends. They reified in their imagination the psychic forces of internalized repression and wished to act on them. In the end
of the day, they looked like whimsical youth
that did not want to work and only have fun.
It is true that Reich and Marcuse explained
the character that radically different existential conditions of relations between men will
carry in socialist and communist societies.
However, the protesters erred in believing
that they can bring these about without first
transforming the base of society, the economic kernel of the real. For communism, in
words of Marx, is strictly an ideal to which
reality will have to adjust itself. Partially,
the New Left misconceived the socialism because they were disillusioned (and rightly so)
with the reality of the Stalinist State. However, they were too quick to apply the Marxist
dialectical categories that require tuning to
particular conditions of the class struggle in
a given society and unjustifiably exchanged
the grandeur of Marxist revolutionary
claims of the totality of reality transformation for the dreams of individual liberation.
This is an inherent vice of bourgeoisie revolutionary fight confounding with bohemianism that comes from the absence of
material relation to production in the class.
The counterculture could not carry on

long, for in the logic of late capitalism it is

necessary to convert idle capital into service capital and simultaneously to replace
service capital with productive capital, in
other words, services with commodities.
Once, non-commodified social relations
that produced surplus social capital (such
as objects of authentic culture) have been
incorporated by the capital, access to them
now is mediated by the market with profit
motive. This process is well evident from the
ugly gentrification of Haight-Ashbury, for
example. With the erasure of the borders of
consumption and widespread adoption of
genital sexuality in marketing technics, there
is now no beyond no transgression that
frees the spirit and ignites the fire in the soul.
Rebels are no more. All is profaned and
commonplace. In Theodor Adornos words,
By learning to fear social authority and experiencing it as a threat of castration and
immediately as fear of impotence an individual identifies itself with precisely this
authority of which it is afraid. In exchange,
however, it now suddenly belongs to it and
can dance along. Consumption infused
with sex appeal therefore follows the classic
capitalist logic of double contradiction: first
it provokes anxiety in individual and then
demands obedience to compensate for it. It
follows the formula of Marcuses repressive
desublimation: Obey, and you will be rewarded. By offering instantaneous, rather
than mediated gratifications, repressive desublimation was considered by Marcuse to
remove the energies otherwise available for
a social critique; and thus to function as a
conservative force under the guise of liberation. Here, sexual suppression is lifted to
inject surplus-value of the product. Dreams
of escape through sex (or drugs) were
commodified as part of the growing commercialization of leisure in late capitalism.
Unless you are an artist of course who
depends on the market for his subsistence,
I encourage the reader to resist the pleasure in responding to provocation, calling
to channel your sexuality to the marketplace. Take a pause. Get your shit together. Do not be overwhelmed by a dictate
to enjoy your life. For when hippies did
it, they were out of the markets reach.
And we are now much less fortunate
than they. Hunter Thompson said it all:
What Leary took down with him was the
central illusion of a whole life-style that he
helped to create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of
the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption
that somebodyor at least some forceis

35

tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

No, nobody is there to guarantee that
your or my efforts to surgically change the
world with the instruments of love and empathy will work out. On the contrary, the
world now appears to be an abyss where all
our dreams of a future better for everybody
find their price tag and get to be distributed
via App Store. Change has degraded to a
change of attributes. Sexual liberation, for
example, as Michel Foucault first noticed
already in 60s, degraded into a matter of
sharpening the conformity. LGBT politics,
naturally, as a political technology tool adopted by capitalist jockeys in the West, has
become a tool of murdering of unconventional sexuality en masse. There are no
more people who love each other and have
sex only letters denoting the manner in
which consumers prefer to penetrate each
others perineums in a domesticated environment. Letters for people. New letter
new you. It is the world of people-labels
that nobody takes seriously. And amidst the
elusive simulacra there is only one man who
holds it altogether with a power of Hope
in a better union. But there is no hope for
a better union. There is only hope in new
markets and Arabian oil. It is the umbilical
cord of the late US capitalism literally,
a box of sodomy wrapped up as a land of
opportunity. This is the main nerve of the
American Dream that Hunter Thompson
was looking for in Vegas. This is the exit
from the vortex. This is the end Of our
elaborate plans, the end. Of everything
that stands, the end in words of Jim
Morrison. No safety, or surprise, the end.
Give up the hope. Do not believe. There
will be no peaceful transaction, for nobody
holds the falling roof of the house and capitalism (namely, beastly, ugly, unstoppable
greed for paper sallied with blood) prevents
any decisive counter-measure. I am against
the creation of emancipatory, tolerant, politically correct, and progressive culture,
whatever it is, and any intermingling between culture and politics unless it is the
real politics of revolution. However, any culturally expressive real politik today will be
immediately suppressed out of a danger it
carries to global capitalism. Hence, I cannot see what revolutionary culture can we
be talking about unless we are talking about
underground and unabashedly subversive
culture. I say resist the pleasure to participate in a simulated or glass-breaking riot.
If you still do, then make sure you raise the
hell. Ideally, read Marx, organize, and prepare for the revolution secretly. A working
class hero is something to be. Before that?

36

ARCADIA POLITICAL MAGAZINE

ISSUE I

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